


Who We Are

by bette (Dragonsjustice), Dragonsjustice



Category: Justice League & Justice League Unlimited (Cartoons), Teen Titans (Animated Series), Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Teenagers, And It's Long, Fear Gas/Fear Toxin, Hal Jordan is Difficult, I Made Another AU, I am going to Break your Hearts, Multi, Past Child Abuse, Probably References to Other Fandoms, Psychological Torture, Rich Kids and Princesses, Shayera's Wings Are Good At Stuff, The Rogues are Basically Wally's New Family, Torture, Wally Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2016-08-16
Packaged: 2018-05-09 10:28:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 30,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5536472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonsjustice/pseuds/bette, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragonsjustice/pseuds/Dragonsjustice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Metahumans. They have abilities beyond the comprehension of normal humans, and are a threat to society. A crime against humanity.</p><p>Which is why Lex Luthor has ordered them to be rounded up and sent to Meta-Max and LexCorp facilities all over the world.</p><p>So when seven metahuman teenagers wake up in three different cells, they know that they have to combine their powers and find a way out of their trap. But it's hard when all of them have their own issues, and their own skeletons in their closets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Up in the Morning, Up in the Evening

**Author's Note:**

> I made another AU! And I'm really excited for this one-like you wouldn't believe! Seriously, I've been up late working on this baby. It's very precious to me, so please treat it kindly.
> 
> As always, I love reviews on my works.
> 
> This will be the first in a series of at least two fics, something that I am very excited (and pleased) about.
> 
> The M rating is for violence and stuff like that only, which will come in later chapters.
> 
> Well, I'll get on with the story. The first chapter is mostly just buildup, but it should start to really get going soon.
> 
> All chapter titles are taken from the song 'Who We Are' by Imagine Dragons.
> 
> ~Trashcan_Dragon

The late afternoon sun beat down on a group of teens and young adults that walked slowly down the street, trying to stick to the shrinking shadows. The man at the front of the group, who was less than twenty four years old, looked around with pale blue eyes at all of the other people walking by. His gaze also passed over his own group, making eye contact with the person at the rear of the cluster of teens, a girl that shared some physical characteristics of him-the ones that any sibling would share.

Ahead of her by a few steps, a redheaded teen carefully hopped from each section of shade. When the boy beside him, whose blond hair was streaked with faded pink highlights, tripped, the teenager quickly ducked underneath his friend’s shoulder to support him. On the other side of the blond boy, a teen with choppy dark hair reached up to tap his right ear. When he wrinkled his nose slightly, the blond boy got his attention and then told a joke to distract him. Even though he couldn’t really hear it, he could still read his friend’s lips.

The sound of a gunshot shattered through the warm air.

As one, the group leapt forwards. The redheaded boy grabbed the two closest to him (the blond and the deaf teen) and took off like an arrow, feet pounding the asphalt as he sprinted towards an alley. The girl at the back of the group grabbed the hand of one of the male teenagers, pulling him along as he swivelled to try to face where the shots had come from.

“Roscoe, it’s not worth it,” she half-begged, yanking on his arm. The man at the head of the group turned to look at her, shoving another man, one with severe burns up and down his arms, into the relative safety of the alley.

“Lisa, what’s going on?”

Roscoe ripped his hands away. “I’m sick and tired of running. I’m done with hiding. And now I’m done listening to you two. I love you Lisa, I really do, but I’m done hiding who I am just because some rich bastard says I can’t go out in public unless I’m one of their little  _pets."_

A man stepped out of his car wearing sunglasses and holding a gun, which he pointed at Lisa and Roscoe.

_"No!"_

The redheaded teen appeared beside the two in a blur of motion, shoving them away just as the gunshot rang out. He let out a yelp of pain and stumbled, hand jumping to his shoulder as blood started to paint his thin fingers scarlet. Roscoe swore and tried to grab his arm, causing the teenager to bite his lips together to prevent himself from screaming as he tore it away as fast as possible-so, pretty damn fast.

The man ran from the alley and grabbed his sister and Roscoe, pushing them towards the alleyway where the deaf teen pulled them in, much to the annoyance (and anger) of Roscoe. Then he tried to push the redhead along in front of him, but another gunshot made him fall back, although fortunately it didn’t hit him.

A faint sound, akin to music, rang through the air. It curled around his head, and every member of the group expected him to fall to the ground and sleep for a week, but instead he just smirked and tapped his ears. Earplugs.

A second gunman ran in from a side street, pressing the barrel of the gun to the back of the teen’s head. He froze in place, pain-filled green eyes widening. His arms were forced behind his back, and the men ignored his whimper of pain. They hauled him to his feet (when had he fallen to the ground?) and allowed him a good look at the alleyway where his friends had fled.

“Look,” the man hissed into his ear. “They’re gone. They left you alone.”

They didn’t see the boy grin. He was captured, but his friends had escaped, and that was all that really mattered.

He was barely paying attention as they read him his rights.

“You are under arrest for crimes against humanity…”

* * *

 

A crescent moon was at its zenith, spreading its silvery light across the dark cityscape. Glints of light reflected off of poorly concealed knife blades, and homeless men, women, and children sleeping in huddled piles in doorways. But this wasn’t the type of city where everything started to calm down at night-no, here, night was when everyone started to finally wake up for the day.

So in the odd collection of prostitutes, pimps, officers, business owners, lawyers on their way to their clients, petty crooks, strippers, construction workers, tailors, grocers, homeless people, and the occasional honest human being, nobody noticed the two teenagers wearing dark glasses as they walked down the street. They were around seventeen years old, and they actually blended in well-the only thing that made them stand out was the fact that their clothes weren’t as dirty as the criminal’s or as clean as those worn by the businessmen (they had been recently cleaned, which the two were incredibly grateful for) and the small matter of the pair wearing sunglasses at midnight.

The pair was clearly on edge, muscles tensed and bright blue eyes suspicious behind the glasses. But while the boy seemed to want to be as far from the crowds as possible, the girl seemed much more at home-even as she carefully assessed everyone around her for weapons and threats, she also took stock of how healthy they were and whether or not they were eating properly. Most of them weren’t, as a side effect of the city, and those ones got small scraps of bread slipped to them.

The boy, who pretended not to notice, didn’t actually mind.

That is, until his attention was caught by a trio of people that didn’t do the best job of blending into the mass.

“Di,” he hissed, tugging on her sleeve. “We’ve got company.”

Without looking, she leaned forward and wrapped her arms around his neck, appearing to press her lips against his ear. In reality, she was speaking in a low whisper that only her companion would be able to distinguish from the low babble that came from the crowd.

“Where?” She asked.

He turned his head until his mouth was next to her ear, mimicking her position. “Three men, one by that pimp over there, one by the brewery door, and one’s pretending to talk to the police officer over there.”

“Think that they’ve seen us yet?” His companion muttered, risking a glance from the corner of her eye. Even though she knew that the men probably couldn’t see where she was looking, it never hurt to be careful when the Hunters were involved. Of course, if these even were members of the elusive group of trackers called the ‘Hunters’ in the first place. They could just be mercenaries, or random members of the criminal underground. “They could just be undercover dirty cops.”

“Since when has our luck been that good?” He replied wryly. “Come on, we have to get moving.”

“Okay, time to-” She broke off when she saw that one of the men (the one at the door of the brewery) had pulled out a gun and was pointing it at her friend’s head. “Get down!”

She pounced, pushing him to the ground. The gun fired, and the bullet pinged off of one of the stone gargoyles that sat with hunched rocky wings above them. A few chips of stone rained down on their heads, and in a split second the two were up on their feet and running. They ducked and wove through the throgs of people that didn’t seem to care about the gunfire-and they didn’t, not really. In their city, bullets were as common as raindrops, only more painful.

What they were not used to, however, was seeing Hunters in their city.

It wasn’t that they disliked them. In fact, most of the denizens would be downright welcoming. But Hunters rarely ventured into the dark city, instead choosing to stick to places where the population was less fluid and easier to set traps in.

Which made the whole gloomy place the perfect hideout for their quarries.

Especially the sewers, which was where the two teenagers were headed.

The girl ripped open a manhole cover and used it as a makeshift shield to protect the two from the next round of bullets, although it probably wouldn’t do much. The boy jumped down without a second thought, and his friend followed in a heartbeat. As soon as the two were both down and out of the way, the girl pulled the manhole cover down over them and left the unusual pair in complete darkness.

A rumbling sound came from down one side of the sewer pipe.

Both of them froze. The pair dropped down into crouches, raising their fists after tugging off their sunglasses. The girl’s bright blue eyes flicked over to the boy and saw that his own were narrowed into cerulean slits.

“The rumors,” he stated. “They’re true.”

“I gathered,” she answered. “I will face my fate with honor.”

“We don't need to face our fate,” the boy pointed out. “We aren't going to die.”

“There are worse things than death.”

“That may be true,” he admitted begrudgingly. “But that thing isn't one of them.”

As the rumbling got louder, the two prepared for what could end up being the fight of their lives.

* * *

 

A teen walked along a dirty street just as the sun was starting to peek over the top of the buildings and distant hills. He wore a thin black hoodie, hood up and hands shoved into his pockets. The boy took several deep breaths as his fingertips tingled with the power that he tried so desperately to hide from outsiders.

“I’ll be fine,” he muttered to himself, scanning the street for the millionth time. “He’ll be fine. He’s always fine. He’s done this a thousand times before, and this isn’t any different.”

Almost immediately after he spoke, loud alarms started to blare from a nearby store. A man in his early twenties barrelled out like the devil himself was on his tail, arms flailing wildly and chest already heaving.

“Go, go, go!” He shouted, practically running the teenager over. “The Hunters will be here soon!”

Said teenager joined him in running, even outpacing the slightly older man. His broad shoulders may not have been as fit for running as the other man’s lean ones, but he hadn’t been living on the streets for nearly as long and still had the memories of full meals eaten at a table with family. Well, vague ones at least.

“I should have been more careful,” the man who had broken into the store apologized in between labored breaths. “I didn’t even see the Meta-Alarm.”

“Did you use your powers?”

“…Yeah. But I had to! There were security cameras and stuff that I had to cover. I didn’t even know that places like that even had Meta-Alarms.” The man risked a glance over his shoulder and sighed with relief when he saw that nobody had started to chase them. “Oh man, Carol is going to kill me.”

A sharp bang rang out, less like a gunshot and more like a small explosion. The ground beneath their feet went up, and the two let out cries of surprise and pain as they were lifted up off of their feet and up into the air by the force of the blast.

The older man grabbed the teen’s arm and pulled him up higher in the sky, out of the range of any further blasts. He nodded to his companion. “You okay?”

“Fine. You can let go of me now.” When he was released, the teen dropped down a few feet in the air before regaining his balance (so to speak) and rising back up to his friend’s eye level. “What was that?”

“Hunters, I think. Gah, I’m so stupid! I shouldn’t have broken in there in the first place, and now we’re on the run _again,_  and _where_ _the hell_ _is_ _Carol?!”_ The eyes of the young man who had broken in grew steadily brighter green until they glowed neon before slowly winking back down to their natural color. “Sorry. But seriously, where’s Carol?”

“Right here, boys,” a girl’s voice spoke up, and the two males spun in the air to see a young woman glowing pinkish-purple hovering behind them. “Bad news-we’re surrounded.”

“Put your hands in the air and land on the ground!”

“For the record, this is all your fault,” the younger teen sighed.

* * *

 

The secretary stared at the young man in front of her. He couldn’t have been older than seventeen or maybe eighteen, and he was wearing nice clothes and had neatly brushed thick black hair. His large blue eyes were nervous but still certain, and they fit well with the rest of his face. She was pretty sure that she had seen him at church before.

She must have misheard him. She could have sworn that she had heard him say that he was a…

“I’m sorry, you’re a  _what?"_

“I’m a metahuman,” he repeated. “And I’m here to turn myself in.”

Looking around to make sure that nobody else had heard him, she leaned forwards. “Why? Wouldn’t it be better to get out of town?”

He ducked his head and avoided making eye contact with her. “I don’t want the police or the Hunters to come after my parents or my friends. It’ll be better for everyone if I just turn myself in. Less people will get hurt because of me that way.”

“That’s… That’s very brave of you,” she admitted in surprise. She tapped the large, conspicuous, fire-engine red button on her desk for ‘metahuman emergencies.’ “The authorities will be here soon.”

“I know.” He sat down in one of the chairs near her desk and smiled. The secretary sighed to herself. He seemed like such a nice boy-it was such a shame that he was a metahuman. Her own son was most likely only a few years younger than him, and they might have gone to the same school if this young man lived in their small farming town.

By the time that a small squad arrived to pick him up, the two were engaged in a simple conversation about life in general. She watched as he was led into the back of a large black van with white lettering and a familiar logo on the side, hands cuffed behind him by stern-faced officers unlike the kind ones that she worked with/for. She hoped that one day, when a cure was developed, she would see him again.

But she knew that that was incredibly unlikely.

Most of the people who went into LexCorp buildings and Meta-Max facilities never came back out.

* * *

 

Five men struggled to hold down a thrashing and spitting-mad teenage girl, shouting for backup. The head of the unit barked an order at his right-hand man, who reluctantly advanced forwards and jabbed the girl in the stomach with a cattle prod. She screamed and twisted her upper body around, fist swinging and then smashing into his jaw as hard as she could. The man went flying backwards into a wall, and the head of the unit growled angrily and pulled out his gun, stepping deftly into the commotion and pressing the barrel of the gun against her temple.

“Try something like that again, bitch, and you’ll be spitting out lead before you can lift a finger,” he stated, nodding to the rest of the unit. All of the other men but two moved to handcuff the girl, albeit cautiously-the man who she had punched into the wall and his friend who went to make sure that he was okay.

The head of the Hunter unit spotted a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye and pressed the gun harder against his captive’s skull. “Get her wings, too.”

She glared at him angrily with bright golden eyes, and he sneered. “Come on, pretty bird. Won’t you sing?”

She didn’t say anything, instead choosing to keep glaring with her strangely colored irises.

He sighed and pulled the gun away before suddenly whipping it back towards her, slamming the weapon against her jaw. She slumped down, dazed and motionless but still conscious on the floor. Her enormous wings were trembling mounds of tattered dusty brown feathers stretched out on the floor behind her. They were weak from malnutrition and testing-if she was at full strength, they would be able to lift her up and out of the horrible place and into the sky, where she would never have to come back down to earth for anybody.

The girl sighed as she felt them being bound tightly, the familiar ropes and chains digging into her flesh as her hands were cuffed together in front of her and her legs were tied at the ankle and at the knee. She was roughly hauled to her feet by the metal collar around her neck and forced to hop awkwardly into the back of a black van.

Oh, she knew that the Hunters assumed that any last fight that she had in her was just a remnant, a scrap of fear that allowed her to push against them. They didn’t know that she spent every waking moment (and even in her sleep, planning in dreamland) plotting their demise. How could they?

But soon, they would feel the wrath of the hawk.

* * *

 

“Did you get the meta?” The officer asked, crossing his arms and narrowing his eyes behind his sunglasses. He may not have liked Hunters in his city, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t willing to tolerate them if they were in pursuit of a metahuman suspect.

“Yes. The metahuman is in our custody. There is nothing more to worry about.” The Hunter’s voice sounded… Mechanical, robotic, and very, very inhuman. The officer shivered-he would never get used to them.

“How did it even manage to escape in the first place? Aren’t your facilities basically impenetrable?” He knew that he was treading into dangerous territory, but he was curious. Meta-Max prisons were supposed to be the hardest things in the world to break out of or break into, for normal humans and especially for metahumans. If they were anything less than what they were advertised as, than the world would need to know about it. It wasn’t the same as everyday criminals breaking out of places like Arkham-they were superhuman, better (and worse) than the normal homo sapiens in every way.

“The metahuman had unforeseen powers that we had not yet discovered, as it was careful to keep them hidden from us. One of those powers was the manipulation of cerebrum and the cerebral cortex. It could control minds with a thought in the right direction.” The Hunter’s voice was even and flat, completely devoid of emotion. “It could also change the density of its body, allowing it to pass through walls and doors with little effort. All of those factors, along with the power failure of the facility where it was being held, contributed to its escape. It will not be happening again.”

The officer nodded slowly and walked off-he had paperwork to do, after all.

Unbeknownst to everyone but the Hunters, a teenager was cuffed and bound in the back of the van that they had brought to detain him, looking normal in almost every way.

Except for one small detail.

His skin was completely green.

* * *

 

Seven teenagers all on their way to the same place. All without knowing that some day, some day _soon,_ they would change the world.


	2. Picking Down Clocks When the Birds Come Out to Eat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know nothing about anything medically related, which should be kept in mind for the rest of the story.

When Wally West woke up, his entire body was sore and his arms were handcuffed to the wall above his head. Man, that hadn't happened since… Since before he figured out that he was a metahuman. Since before he started running. Since before he met his  _new_  family. Well, not family exactly, but it was the closest thing to it that he'd ever really had for a long time.

The teenager banished the thoughts from his head. He had more important things to focus on, like escaping from these handcuffs.

Okay, handcuffs. He had been in these lots of times. All that it took to escape was a little vibration, and he should be out in seconds. It had never failed before, and he'd been in  _much_ worse jams than this, right?

Closing his bright green eyes, Wally concentrated on vibrating his wrists (and ankles, he hadn't noticed that they were cuffed too) at the right frequency to phase through his bounds. It had been  _way_  too long since he practiced this particular maneuver, and Len would murder him if he ever found out how out of practice he was.

_Shit. Len!_  He'd been knocked out by those people (had they been Hunters? He couldn't quite remember) before he could see what had happened to the rest of his little group. Giova- _James_  and Hartley would probably be okay-they were smart, but they were also the ones that the rest had an unspoken oath to protect. But he'd pushed Roscoe and Lisa out of the way of the bullet, and hadn't he seen that they were all gone before some dude with muscles the size of watermelons and tattoos knocked him into unconsciousness.

Shit, he'd been shot, hadn't he?

Wally twisted his neck around and tried to see his shoulder where the bullet had struck. His shirt was stained with dried blood, but it didn't hurt very much anymore. The wound had healed like he'd suspected-with the bullet itself still lodged under his skin. Which meant that he was going to have to cut it out later… That was going to be fun.

No, he could deal with that later. Right now Wally had to figure out how to get out of these cuffs.

"Don't bother," a low (but still on the younger side) male voice said from across the room when they saw his seventh failed attempt. "If you do it too many times it'll electrocute you, and it hurts like a bitch."

Man, he was losing his touch. First he got shot, then he couldn't escape, and now he was surprised by someone whose presence he should have noticed the minute that he woke up.

"He's not exaggerating," a second voice, also male, spoke up from one of the corners across from him. "And if you keep trying after it shocks you the first time, the doses will just get higher."

Wally glared in their direction. "Well, maybe I want to get out no matter the cost, did you ever think of that?"

"We all want to get out," the one in the corner spoke up. "But we can't do that if we have no idea where we are."

The boy sighed and leaned back against the cold cement wall, now-adjusted eyes picking up on the humanoid shapes that he had been speaking to. "How do you know that we even will escape? I mean, the Hunters play for keeps."

And that  _was_  who had him-them-wasn't it? The Hunters?

A small bitter sound that could have been a laugh came from the one who had spoken first to warn him about the electric shocks. "We don't. Nobody who goes into the Meta-Maxes ever comes out."

_And on that happy note,_ Wally thought wryly. "Well, seeing as how we're probably going to die together, do you two mind telling me your names? I'm Wally, by the way."

The one in the corner huffed in what might have been amusement. "Hello Wally, I'm John. John Stewart."

"Bruce." The one across from him said shortly.

"What, no last name?" Wally teased him.

"Last names don't matter anymore," Bruce said, almost growling.

John bristled slightly. "Don't tell me that you're resigned to death already."

"No, I just learned a long time ago not to sugarcoat things."

"Okay!" Wally broke in. "Who wants to swap stories of how we got caught and compare notes? Because something tells me that we stand a much better chance of getting out of here if we know what  _not_  to do." He didn't need perfect night vision to know that the two were staring at him, and he shifted uncomfortably. "What?"

"He's right," Bruce announced. "If we want to escape, then we'll need a plan."

"You want a plan?" John said, crossing his arms as his unusual green eyes flashed with power in the darkness of the cell. "Here's a plan; don't get cocky, don't trust anyone, and don't get caught. If you do that, you can't  _possibly_  be caught." The other teenager sounded so bitter that both of the others knew that he was repeating advice that someone else had given him-possibly even someone else who had also been captured.

"That's-" Wally began, ready to tell John that sometimes trusting people was the best (or only) option.

He was interrupted by the door (the one that only Bruce had known was there) opening. The silhouette of a man with a clipboard was standing there, one with an unusually large head and small shoulders. Weird.

"Bring them all," he said, snapping his fingers. Oh, Wally  _really_ did not like the sound of that.

* * *

 

Carefully rubbing his injured shoulder (all of the cuffs had been removed), Wally squinted and looked around the room that he and his new cellmates were now it. It was far brighter than the other one, with white walls and several large machines. There was something that looked almost like a treadmill on one side, a stack of weights on the other, a long obstacle course that looked like it would take hours to complete for a normal human, and a large glass box that seemed to be mostly useless.

At least now he got an actual look at his two roommates.

Another one of the doors (this one on the other side of the room) opened, sliding up in front of the people in the same way that their had to allow them access.

There were only two of them this time, both girls a few years older than Wally was-so around John and Bruce's respective ages. The minute that the two laid eyes on the trio of male teenagers, vastly different expressions flickered across their faces. One of them, the girl with sleek black hair and bright blue eyes, looked almost… Relieved. Happy, even. That was a little strange.

But while the other girl had a guarded look on her face and apprehension shining in her strange golden eyes, Wally was a little bit too focused on her  _wings_  to care. Yes, wings. Giant, dusky brown hawk wings that were folded on her back. They must have been magnificent when she was younger-now, the feathers were dull and quite a few looked like they were missing.

Still, it wasn't every day that you saw someone with  _actual fucking wings growing out of their spine._

It also wasn't every day that you got kidnapped, stuck in a cell with two strangers who also had powers (crap, he forgot to ask what their powers actually were), and then 'escorted' (read: forcefully dragged) to what looked like some sort of training room after being shot in the shoulder and then knocked out and dumped in a creepy black van.

The men who had helped the creepy doctor guy 'escort' them down to the white room marched over and herded the two females over. The one without wings immediately slipped in between John and Bruce, the latter of which took a small step to the side that was almost invisible to anybody not looking for it-or anybody who couldn't see in milliseconds-to brush his shoulder against hers. The pair obviously knew each other.

Her sort-of companion, the teenager with the wings, stood a little bit away from the other four. She crossed her arms, wings held slightly away from her back like she was trying to appear bigger than she actually was. Didn't most birds do that when they were threatened?

The man with the strange head (the nametag on his chest read 'Dr. Sivana') stood in front of them with his clipboard in both hands. He squinted angrily at the pair of goons that had brought them there at his orders. "Where are the other two? Your orders were clear!"

The two exchanged nervous looks, and Wally wondered if they weren't just hired muscle after all-all brawns and no brains.

"The boss said not to let them out. One of 'em's a telepath, Doc. We shouldn't bring it out if it's able to use its powers," one of them started to say, sounding nervous. Wally couldn't blame him. Dr. Sivana may not have looked particularly threatening, just really creepy, but he could probably pull a few strings and make their lives hell if he really wanted to.

The doctor growled. "Tell Strange that I will be speaking to him  _personally_  if he doesn't let me have them. Now is the only chance for them to be tested  _together,_ against each other."

Both of the men paled, all of the blood draining from their faces.

"Yes sir," they muttered obediently at the exact same time. "We'll go do that now," the slightly shorter one added, elbowing his partner in the ribs. Dr. Sivana nodded, curling his lip up slightly.

"Good. Now go."

They were gone in under two seconds, and Wally had to stifle a snicker of laughter. He didn't think that he'd have very many chances to laugh in this place.

Immediately, Dr. Sivana swivelled on his heel to face the redheaded teenager. "You just volunteered to be the first test subject. Congratulations."

Wally bit his lip. Test subject sounded bad.

He didn't notice the winged girl giving him a golden-eyed look that held a mixture of relief and pity. Relief because it wasn't going to be her, and pity because it was going to be him instead.

One of the other doors (how many were there in this room alone, anyways?) slid open, and the two beefy guards returned. This time they had another pair of kids (who were once again older than Wally-he felt as if it was going to be a bit of a recurring theme), one more normal-looking and one that couldn't have passed as human, similar to the two girls that they had brought in earlier.

The boy that looked more normal had black hair and blue eyes like Bruce and his friend.

The one that didn't had green skin and bright red eyes, and was wearing some sort of black collar with red lights on it.

And now that they were both here, it meant that the tests (you know, the ones that Dr. Sivana had said that he would be the first subject for) could begin.  _Oh, what fun!_  Wally thought sarcastically.

Dr. Sivana took a step forward in Wally's direction, and the metahuman boy automatically tensed. The doctor was smaller than him, and most likely much less strong, but that didn't mean that he couldn't hurt him. He had had far too many people hurt him in his life to underestimate a potential opponent now.

"Get on the treadmill."

Wally frowned. That… Was not what he had been expecting. Slowly (at least for him), he walked over across the huge room and clambered onto the giant machine. The rest of the teens stayed on the other side, where, in their opinion, it was safer.

"Okay," Wally called down to Dr. Sivana. "What do you want me to do now?"

Before the doctor could answer, Bruce clenched his jaw. He had spotted what the others had failed to see. The treadmill, in addition to being very large and high-tech (and probably built to withstand even Wally's speeds-from the way that he had vibrated his limbs in an attempt to escape from the handcuffs, Bruce could guess that his power was based off of speed), also had a  _very_  suspicious looking metal box attached to the front. One with what looked like a lightning bolt design on it.

Bruce had a very good-well, actually it was a very  _bad_ -idea about what exactly that box did.

"I want you to run," Dr. Sivana said plainly. "And I don't want you to stop."

"Uh…" The teenager blinked. "Okay, then… I guess."

He half turned until he was facing the front of the treadmill before starting to jog in place. Bruce didn't see when or how Dr. Sivana had turned it on, but he had. As he watched, the younger boy picked up the pace until his legs became a blur.

Someone tapped his shoulder, and Bruce turned. He smirked. "You still can't sneak up on me, Diana."

She smiled genuinely at him, and Bruce remembered why he cared about her so much. "One day, you  _will_  teach me your tricks." Diana turned her gaze to where Wally was running on the treadmill. "I'm in a cell with Shayera Hol. She told me to give up hope now so that I wouldn't be disappointed later. Should I listen to her?"

Bruce knew what she was asking-and what she wasn't asking. Diana had never needed his permission to do something, and rarely asked for advice. She wanted to know two things; who was in his cell (and their names/powers too for good measure) and how they were going to escape. One of those things he had an answer to. The other one… Well, he was working on it.

"The one on the treadmill is Wally, and the one next to you is John. I think you can guess what Wally's power is"-he was rewarded with a small smile-"and I'm pretty sure that John can make hard light constructs."

"Pretty sure?" She said teasingly.

"I'm sure. I saw them when he was brought in."

"Shayera can fly," Diana said softly. "But I don't think that she has for a very long time."

Bruce turned his attention back to the treadmill with a small frown. Wally couldn't keep up that pace for much longer by his estimation-maybe if he had been better fed, but the teenager was abnormally skinny. He also likely had an injured shoulder, judging by the way that he had been rubbing it earlier, and probably hadn't eaten in a long time.

So it didn't surprise him to see that the younger teenager was starting to slow down. Over the course of roughly forty seconds, Wally's pace abated until he was slowly (for him) walking on the machine. Bruce narrowed his eyes as Dr. Sivana scowled and marched up to the treadmill. "Did I tell you to stop?"

"N-no, but I can't run anymore," Wally panted. "I haven't eaten in around a day, and I have a  _really_  fast metabolism that means that I have to eat a lot more than a normal person or else I can't run and I faint." His voice had taken on a slight pleading quality, and John winced when he heard it.

Dr. Sivana growled and marched up to the box in front of the treadmill. Beside him, Bruce felt Diana tense. "What is that?"

"Nothing good," he said quietly.

Wally's green eyes widened when he saw where Dr. Sivana was going. He moved as if it jump off of the large treadmill, but his legs felt as if they were frozen in place.

When Dr. Sivana jabbed one of the buttons on the machine, the one marked with a lightning bolt, Bruce couldn't say that he was surprised (although that didn't stop the pang of sympathy and pity that went through his chest) when electricity arched up from the base of the treadmill through some unseen mechanism and coiled around Wally's body. For a moment, the redheaded boy looked simply surprised, and he waved a hand through one of the visible humming strands as if it were merely water.

That was when he started screaming.

He fell to his knees in pain, hardly aware of the fact that the high-pitched keening sounds were coming from his own throat. This was the most electricity that he had ever felt in his entire life-even worse than that one day that…

Dr. Sivana was not expecting to be attacked by six teenagers at once.

Shayera, Diana, and John all pounced on him, while the green-skinned boy raised his arms into the air. Several pieces of the obstacle course ripped up and away from their places to hurl themselves at the scientist. Meanwhile, Bruce and the other black haired, blue eyed boy ran for the machine at the front of the treadmill. As Bruce hit the button to shut the electricity off, the other teenager lifted up into the air (Bruce mentally added 'flight' to the small list of powers that he now knew the boy had) and pulled Wally off of the device.

He looked shocked (pun unintended) as he alighted on the ground, staring down at the younger teen in his arms. As Bruce sprang down to stand beside him, he looked up at him with wide blue eyes.

"I-I…" He began, and Bruce felt a sinking feeling in his gut as he looked down at the metahumans limp body. "I can't hear his heartbeat…"

Immediately, Bruce eased Wally out of his arms. He carefully laid the speedster down on the hard white floor, ignoring the sounds of commotion behind him. He pressed two fingers lightly against the redhead's freckled neck. No pulse.

Diana alighted down on the ground behind him right as he started counting chest compressions. Her eyes were wide and she looked afraid, but she knew better than to ask him anything while he was so focused. Especially because of what- _who_ -he was focused on.

Shayera landed next to her, one wing still open. She took a sidestep closer to the other girl, wrapping her light brown wing around Diana's shoulders. The slightly older metahuman reached up to touch one of the still-intact primary feathers on the wing, brushing it lightly with her fingertips. Upon closer inspection, it had several darker flecks that added some nice personality to the huge extra limbs.

"Did you know him?" She asked, and Diana stiffened slightly. She didn't like the way her cellmate it-like the boy, Wally, was already gone.

"No, I  _don't,"_ she said, putting extra emphasis on the words. "But I know Bruce."

"Which one is he?"

Diana nodded in her friend's direction, but didn't actually look over there herself.

"…38…39…"

"What are his powers?" Shayera coaxed.

"Enhanced strength, speed, and senses, as well as a powerful intellect. He also has a very high pain tolerance, but I don't know if that's a metahuman ability or just plain stubbornness."

"What about y-"

Before Shayera could finish the word, all of the doors slammed open at once. The winged meta jumped into the air and spun, looking for the attack. But it was coming from too many places at once, and she didn't know who to focus on first. The men armed with crackling batons advancing on the boy who had introduced himself in the middle of their fight with Dr. Sivana as John? The green teen who hadn't spoken a word so far who was the only thing keeping Dr. Sivana himself pinned down now that those strange green light constructs were gone? Or one of the two groups that Bruce was too preoccupied to deal with?

_Those ones first,_ she decided, springing into action with a small nod to Diana.

The last thing that she saw before everything went dark was Bruce leaning back from the ginger boy's body.

The last thing that she heard before everything went dark was a small, ragged breath.


	3. Up on the Mountain, Down in the King's Lair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clark's powers are reduced, but only slightly. The major ones are still there, but the lesser-known/less important ones have been removed. Dex-Starr is a canonical Green Lantern character, although his powers as well as his backstory have been modified slightly.

Shayera leaned against the wall of her new cell, wings and the space between them still smarting from where they’d been hit with the riding crop that one of Dr. Sivana’s underlings always seemed to be carrying. This was the first time that she hadn’t cared about the light beating. It was also the first time that she’d ever had anybody else in the room with her.

 

Although that wasn’t  _ quite _ correct. Diana had been her cellmate for at least a few hours.

 

Speaking of Diana, the girl was a lot more badass than Shayera had first thought. The slightly older girl had taken down at least three guards before the winged girl had been knocked out, and proudly informed her that she had knocked out another five before they had taken her out. Shayera approved-it wasn’t every day that you had a chance to take a small form of revenge against your captors.

 

Bruce was sitting across from her, hair rumpled and blue eyes bright with triumph despite their exhaustion. He’d been the only one to remain conscious the entire time, despite what they’d done to him after Shayera passed out. Apparently, before that they took out Green Bean (what? He hadn’t told anybody his name yet, but she’d seen him being dragged down the halls of different facilities. The younger(?) teen had been there for at least as long as she had, maybe even longer) with a blowtorch/flamethrower type thing, and both John and ‘Call Me Clark’ by just hitting them a bunch of times. Shayera had to admit, she liked their style sometimes. And as for ‘Wally…’

 

He’d survived. Somehow.

 

The freckled speedster was currently passed out, having fast fallen asleep sometime after Shayera woke up. Before he had actually fallen asleep, he’d been in some kind of between-stage where he slurred his words. That was the only reason that the metahuman girl even knew his name; he had babbled it out and then made some bumbling attempts at flirting before trying to kiss Diana. John had formed one of his… Whatever-they-weres out of green light and held him up against the wall until he fell asleep, much to the amusement of the two girls.

 

None of the metahuman teenagers were handcuffed or bound, although Green Bean still had his inhibitor collar on. Shayera had knew what it was meant to do (even if none of the general public didn’t), but didn’t understand why he needed one. Wasn’t the whole point of all of these LexCorp-funded Meta-Maxes to ‘study’ and do tests on them because of their powers? What was the purpose of blocking one of them, then? All that it meant was that they couldn’t do anything related to those powers. 

 

Maybe it was something so dangerous they couldn’t let him use it.

 

In that case, Shayera needed to get that collar off.

 

And she could start by asking him his name-seeing as how the seven of them seemed to be stuck together for the long haul, she couldn’t get by only knowing what to call five of them.

 

“So, what  _ is _ your name?” Shayera asked casually making eye contact. Gold on scarlet. “I can’t keep calling you Green Bean in my head.”

 

The silent metahuman tilted his head. “I am…” He frowned after saying the two words in a deep, slow voice, like he had forgotten what he had been going to say next, and Shayera winced in sympathy. Sometimes she thought that the only way that she even managed to remember her own name was because of the last memories that she had left of her mother. “J’onn.”

 

“John? ‘Cause that’s going to get  _ really _ confusing,” Shayera said with a frown as she nodded to John, who made a small sound of agreement.

 

“No, not John. He said J’onn,” Bruce corrected from his place. “It’s nice to meet you, I’m Bruce.”

 

“Diana.” The girl dipped her head and smiled at the green-skinned metahuman.

 

“Shayera.” She nodded. 

 

“John, and the passed out kid is Wally.” John gestured to the redhead as he introduced himself and the other boy.

 

Clark waved from where he was sitting. “I’m Clark.”

 

“It is nice to meet you all,” the boy said softly.

 

The winged girl adjusted her position to be more comfortable. “Mind telling us about your powers, and why you’ve got that fancy inhibitor collar around your neck? I’d share what mine are, but other than enhanced speed, strength, and durability, I think that they’re pretty easy to guess.” She winked and flexed her wings. “Actually, how about we all just go around? Sharing circle style.”

 

“Should we wake Wally up?” Clark asked.

 

Diana shook her head. “Let him sleep. I think he deserves it.”

 

“So,” Shayera said, clapping her hands together, “who wants to go first?”

 

“I will,” J’onn volunteered, raising one of his long-fingered hands. As the others (minus Wally) turned their attention to him, he began in his low, even tone. “My name is J’onn J’onzz. I do not know how old I am, but I believe that I am around… Fifteen years old. I can shapeshift, change the density of my body, change the opacity of my body to become invisible to the human eye, fly, have telepathic powers, and I have telekinetic powers.”

 

John whistled. “That’s a lot of powers for one metahuman.”

 

Diana caught Clark shifting slightly out of the corner of her eye and narrowed them almost imperceptibly. It  _ was _ imperceptible to everyone except for Bruce, who frowned.  “That’s why you have the collar,” he said instead of saying anything about it. “To block out most of them.”

 

J’onn nodded. “Yes. When I’m wearing it, I can only fly, turn invisible, and use my telekinesis.”

 

Shayera remembered the flying equipment that had assisted her, John, and Diana in the attack on Dr. Sivana earlier and grinned. “Nice. What about you, Diana?”

 

The other girl straightened. “I have super strength, can fly, and I think I’m at least a little bit faster than an average human. I’ve also got great reflexes, better than almost anybody else.” Shayera didn’t miss the  _ almost, _ and she could guess who the person was. “I also can tell when someone is lying to me, and I’m partially invulnerable-only on my wrists, actually.”

 

John huffed out a small laugh. “Why only there?”

 

Diana shrugged. “No idea. But because of my reflexes…” She looked at Bruce. “Throw something at me.”

 

He looked around. “What?”

 

“Anything, as long as it’s not too big.”

 

Clark watched as Bruce ran his fingers over the ground, obviously looking for something to throw. Was he really going to throw something at his friend’s head? That didn’t seem very… Nice. Actually, it just seemed plain old mean. But she  _ had  _ asked. 

 

After about thirty seconds of searching, Bruce’s pale fingers managed to wrap around a small chunk of loose cement that had been somehow cracked away (Shayera tried not to think about the mysterious stain on it that looked suspiciously like dried blood). He weighed it in his hand for a moment before pulling his hand back and whipping it at Diana. Hard.

 

If she had been a normal human, it would have struck her either in the eye or on the cheek just below it. Instead, her arm shot up with her wrist in front of one of her bright blue eyes. The piece of concrete hit it with a small sound that was somewhere in between a  _ ping _ and the sound that a finger made when you tapped it against something else covered in flesh, like your shin or your forearm.

 

Shayera clapped appreciatively. “Very nice. How much force can you take on them?”

 

“I once stopped a bullet,” she said proudly, puffing her chest out a little bit.

 

Bruce nodded. “I was there-they were shooting at both of us. Not Hunters, but mercenaries that target metahumans.”

 

John pulled a face. “We- _ I _ ran into a couple of those a few weeks before I got caught. One of the ones that I went up against could make light constructs too, only his were yellow instead of green.”

 

“Just be glad that they weren’t red,” Shayera teased. “You two would have looked like a battling christmas display.”

 

“Well, I did once find a cat that could do stuff with red energy,” John recalled. “But he wasn’t trying to really attack us, just defend his owner, who was actually really nice.”

 

“I’m sorry, you fought a  _ cat?” _ Clark asked with wide eyes. “How did a cat get born as a metahuman-er, metacat?”

 

“Beats me, but it was a nasty piece of work before we got out of there.” John thought back to that little incident. ‘Dexter’ hadn’t really been  _ evil,  _ per-say, seeing as how he was a cat (even though some cats did seem pretty evil at times), but he had known how to use his small arsenal of claws, razor-sharp teeth, excellent night vision, and his strange ability to form red energy into shields and blasts. He’d also used it as some sort of ‘stand,’ forming flat platforms in the air and jumping off of them to get better leverage. John was ashamed to admit that the cat had almost gotten the best of him and Hal until Carol bubbled it with a small sigh and a mutter of  _ “Boys.” _

 

After her small victory over the feline, the three had met his owner-a young woman who was sympathetic to the metahuman cause, being one herself. However, her powers weren’t major, instead allowing her to control the flow of blood to and from her body (something that Carol was extremely jealous of for reasons that she refused to share, saying that it was a ‘girl thing.’ That had been all that John and Hal needed to hear). Apparently, her house had been broken into and she was nearly murdered, her powers the only thing that saved her from death. Her cat had almost died after two criminals threw him off of a bridge, and that was how he ‘discovered’ that he had powers. After finding his way back home, his caretaker retook ownership of him. 

 

John was snapped out of his thoughts about the meta-feline by Bruce asking him a question.

 

“We?” The other metahuman asked, raising one of his eyebrows. He hadn’t missed the way that John stumbled over his own tongue when he was talking about the mercenaries that he had fought. The light manipulator had slipped up at the beginning by accidentally saying ‘we’ before correcting himself to ‘I.’

 

John sighed. “I have… Friends. Two of them. We were all captured at the same time. I don’t know where they are.” Diana opened her mouth to ask a question, but John continued. “They were both older than me by a few years, but after I ran away from home, they were pretty much all that I had. Hal may have been a bit of an ass sometimes”- _ most of the time _ -“but Carol could keep him in line pretty well.”

 

“They sound like important people,” Diana said gently.

 

“Yeah, well,” John huffed, “they got caught.”

 

The six sat in near-silence for a moment, and there was only by the sound of breathing in the small cell.

 

Then it was broken by the sound of faint muttering sound that was coming from where Wally was lying.

 

All of the metahuman teenagers looked over at the freckled boy, who seemed like he could have been the youngest out of all of them, especially since they didn’t know J’onn’s real age. As they watched, he started to twitch, legs moving as if he were imagining that he was running in dreamland.

 

“Is he okay?” Clark asked.

 

J’onn tilted his head. “He is just dreaming. I do not think that it is a nightmare, however. Just an… Odd dream. About music, I think.”

 

Bruce looked at him. “I thought that you couldn’t use your telepathic powers while you were wearing that collar?”

 

“It is… Hard to explain. I cannot always feel it, but when someone has a thought it passes through their minds. I can feel it when it does, and sometimes I can feel the emotions as well.” J’onn closed his eerie red eyes and rested his head back against the wall. “Just because I cannot use my powers doesn’t mean that I cannot  _ feel _ them there.”

 

“Cool. Good to know. Have you tried to get that collar off before?” Shayera asked. If she wanted to get it off herself, she need to know if (or what) he had tried.

 

“Yes.” He raised a green hand and flicked his wrist slowly. The inhibitor collar trembled but didn’t break, and the strangely colored metahuman lowered the raised hand. Bruce absently noted the fact that his fingers were long and slim, almost inhuman looking. “But my telekinetic powers do not work on it.”

 

“What about super-strength?” Clark asked, leaning forwards and carefully wrapping his hand around the collar. J’onn shied away slightly from the touch, and Shayera winced in sympathy as she shifted her position to put less weight on her back and on her large folded wings.

 

“You can try, but I doubt-” 

 

_ Snap. _

 

J’onn reached up to touch the smooth bare skin on his neck where the inhibitor collar had been with wide red eyes. As Shayera watched, a slow smile started to spread across his features. The winged girl wondered when the last time that he had felt proper air on his neck without anything in between. J’onn rolled his shoulders and neck, relishing in the lack of cold plastic and metal.

 

“Can you use the rest of your powers now?” Diana asked, rising to her feet. 

 

In reply, J’onn vanished. Only to reappear a moment later, looking surprised and nervous. “I-I cannot go through the floor.”

 

“What do you mean?” Bruce asked, looking at him with narrowed blue eyes.

 

“Something is stopping me. I can go through the layer of cement, but it feels as if whatever is beneath it is impossible to phase through or reach outside of with my mental powers.” J’onn’s evenly low voice sounded frustrated. “If I cannot go through or use my mental powers, then I cannot release you from this cell. I am sorry.”

 

“So we can’t escape even with your awesome powers,” Shayera summed up. “Well, shit.”

 

“How long have you two been here, anyways?” Bruce asked. “Obviously for far longer than the rest of us have, likely longer than a year or two.”

 

“Try five,” Shayera hissed, feathers ruffling as she crossed her arms over her chest and gritted her teeth. “Or-actually, what year is it? It could actually be six.”

 

“I do not know,” J’onn said softly. “I cannot remember a time when I was not here.”

 

There was a long, somber silence after that, and everybody (except for the still-sleeping Wally) felt a stirring of sympathy. Shayera couldn’t even imagine what it must be like to have no memories of the outside world. At least she knew things like where landmarks were in her hometown, the names of streets, the capitals of some states, what her mother and father looked like, and-wait, did J’onn know how to read? Write? Tell time? Had he ever slept in a bed before? Eaten enough to have a full stomach? She suddenly felt a whole new level of pity for the green teenager.

 

“That’s terrible,” Diana finally said. She had sunk back down to her feet when J’onn had made his statement. The lovely metahuman detached herself from the wall (which now none of them were really sure was actually made of concrete) and crossed over to crouch in front of J’onn, wrapping her arms around him. He stiffened in surprise, faintly glowing bright red eyes going wide with surprise. “I’m sorry.”

 

Shayera nodded. “I-I can’t even imagine…”

 

One of her wings opened slowly until the tip gently touched his shoulder in a gesture of support. She may have only been in Meta-Maxes and hellholes like them for five years (or maybe six, depending on the year), but she still knew how awful they were. The dark side that Luthor kept hidden from the public behind the thin veneer of false pretenses. Before she had been captured, Shayera knew that there were a few intrepid reporters who were trying to expose him, but as far as she knew (mostly based off of the conversations between scientists and hired muscle-some of which were actually surprisingly smart for their occupation) they had yet to have any luck so far.

 

Bruce let out a sound not unlike a low growl. “Bastards.”

 

“Agreed,” John hissed. His odd green eyes flashed brighter in the harsh florescent lighting of the cell, and a green light coated one of his hands like an emerald gauntlet before winking out of existence.

 

Shayera snarled and jumped to her feet before throwing her head back and glaring up at the small black lump at the very top of the wall in the corner that had a small, blinking red light on it. She extended her wings to their full length (or at least until one of them hit the wall and the other ended up in Clark’s face, making him sneeze) and proudly raised her chin with a cold sneer carved into her face.

 

Then she very calmly raised both of her hands and gave the small camera and microphone the finger.

 

John and Diana laughed, J’onn looked confused, Clark looked like he couldn’t decide whether to be scandalized or amused, Wally’s emerald eyes cracked open at the noise before closing again as he fell back to sleep, and Bruce couldn’t suppress a small snort.

 

“Well, as long as it’s a party,” John teased, springing to his feet.

 

The next few minutes were mostly just full of random swearing and insults, including several in other languages and whatever Clark called his weirdly ridiculous Kansas sort-of-swearing-but-not-really. They were pretty hilarious, whatever they were.

 

Wally finally woke up.

 

“What’d I miss?” He asked blearily, trying to sit up.

 

That just made the rest of them (except for Bruce and J’onn, who smirked and continued to look confused respectively) laugh even harder.

 

It was the last time that any of them would laugh for a very long time.


	4. Pushing These Blocks in the Heat of the Afternoon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first time, but not the last, that we will hear about Rudolph West's A+ parenting skills. So consider that your warning.

Diana was going stir-crazy.

She was stuck in a reasonably small room with five relative strangers and one very close friend, with the remains of the ropes and chains that had once been binding them to the wall. There was a drain on the floor where they were supposed to… You know, but the only way to get any privacy whatsoever was to have Shayera stand with her back turned and her wings open as much as possible (the room was longer lengthwise than it was wide) to form a sort of feathery curtain. If it was Shayera herself, all of the boys had to turn their backs-especially Wally, who always seemed to be trying to peer around her wings to see whoever was behind them no matter the gender.

He was the second problem.

The kid (not really a kid, but according to him he had only just turned fifteen a few  _ weeks _ ago, making him the youngest out of all seven of them) seemed to be constantly flirting with someone, whether it was for the purpose of making Clark feel  _ extremely  _ uncomfortable or actually trying to get a ‘date’ with one of them. He seemed to have his sights especially set on Diana herself and Clark, sometimes genuinely asking them out. Whenever they turned him down he would immediately start ‘revenge flirting’ (in his own words) with Shayera and Bruce.

The third problem was food and water.

While all of them-except for Clark, really-were used to going to bed with empty stomachs and waking up thirsty with no source of clean water, but that didn’t make it any easier to live off of the moldy bread, overripe fruit, and scummy water that the goons occasionally dropped off. As it turned out, Diana and Clark didn’t really need to eat as much as a normal human (although they still got hungry), and they usually ended up giving part of their food to Wally, who would literally  _ die _ if he didn’t eat on a regular basis. He did have several tricks that centered around keeping himself alive without eating all of their food.

There were quite a few other problems, but they formed a list too long to say.

J’onn’s collar had been replaced a few hours after Clark removed it, and it was joined by a second one around the neck of the super-strong boy himself, effectively neutralizing that particular power, as well as a second one that Clark said was laser vision. Apparently, he had even more powers than J’onn, something that surprised pretty much all of them.

She didn’t know how long it had been-seeing as how the passage of time was an illusion in the facilities-when they were returned to the white room. Four days? A week? Longer? Wally steadfastly refused to look at the treadmill, which was still in the place where it had been the first time. In fact, everything in the room was exactly the same as it had been before, and still immaculately clean on every surface.

The only difference was that it was full of scientists, goons, and other metahumans of all ages.

While the oldest ones (who couldn’t have been older than twenty-five or twenty-six at the most) were certainly a painful sight to behold, emaciated enough to be skeletons with cuts and bruises marring their skin and dark bags underneath their dead eyes, it was the youngest ones who broke Diana’s heart as they did just as much work as the adults and teenagers. The smallest child must have only been approaching her sixth birthday.

On first glance, most people wouldn’t notice the cruelty of it all, aside from the age of a few of the subjects. But when you looked closer, it was easy to see that almost all of the metahumans were being worked until they dropped, struggling to stand up and continue. One of them, a teenage girl with skin that was only a slightly lighter shade then J’onn’s, stumbled as collapsed on the ground. A scientist nodded to the hired muscle beside him and the large man advanced on her with what looked like a modified cattle prod.

Wally made a small sound of pity as the girl screamed, and Shayera rubbed her shoulder sympathetically as it twinged in reply to the teen’s pain. She knew that cattle-prod-thing well.

Dr. Sivana stood in front of them, a bruise on his collarbone and a split lip, and Diana knew that there were many more that his clothing concealed. She was proud to say that she had been the one to put several of them there in the first place. Unfortunately, the fact that he was still standing even after some time had passed meant that she was rusty.

The doctor curled his lip. “You seven have been returned to my supervision due to the fact that, out of all of you, only two have had your skills properly tested.” J’onn and Shayera looked at each other. They both knew that the other teenager was another half of the ‘two.’ “That means that today will be dedicated to discovering the limits of your different skills.”

Diana didn’t like the sound of that. She looked around at the other metahumans, specifically the ones with similar powers to her or to her… Companions. That included a slim blond girl with powers that seemed to be almost the same as her own and a dark-haired young woman whose powers were akin to John’s, only pink and seemed to mostly revolve around shields instead of any construct that the user could create. John himself seemed to be trying to send her some kind of message with his eyes, irises flashing green every time her face pointed near his direction. She paused in her work-she was doing the obstacle course along with a boy who was forming small golden ankhs in his hands as some sort of shield for the darts that were periodically firing out of the walls-for just long enough to wink at him conspiratorially before turning back to the course.

Maybe that was Carol.

“Get a move on,” one of Dr. Sivana’s goons growled as he shoved her, snapping Diana out of her thoughts. “We don’t have all day.”

Diana had to bite her tongue to keep from snapping at him as she was led away from the rest of the group, who were also being split up. Each of them were led to different places; John to the obstacle course with his friend along with Bruce, Wally back over to that awful treadmill, Shayera to several hoops that were suspended high in the air above the floor, and J’onn and Clark to the weights. Diana herself was being pushed towards an innocuous-looking space in between the obstacle course and the weights. It was riddled with holes, and she  _ really _ didn’t want to know what would come out of them.

But it looked like she was about to find out as bulletproof glass snapped down around her and the wall.

As one of the scientists pressed a button and something similar to bullets started to fire out of the holes at her, Diana sighed and started to dodge, using her wrists whenever a bullet got too close to her. Lovely.

Over at the obstacle course, John dove down underneath freezing dirty water that was probably cleaner than the stuff that they had been giving them to drink. He needed to talk to Carol-he needed to know if she and Hal were okay, if they had been hurt, if Hal had tried to escape yet. He needed to know.

As he watched, Bruce dodged blasts with ease that was almost superhuman, ducking and springing away from everything that came his way. The other teenager was only half-paying attention to the course. The rest of his attention was focused on the other five teens, seeing as how he knew where John was. He needed to make sure that what happened last time never happened again. He was  _ not  _ going to feel someone dying underneath his hands today.

Circling in the air, Shayera relished the feeling of air on her wings, even if it felt artificial. She had only flown once in the actual open sky, and she had been too preoccupied with trying to escape from the Hunters to be focused on the actual action. But from what she could recall, it was an exhilarating experience, second only to the one of punching a Hunter or a scientist in the balls/breasts, depending on the case. But that didn’t mean that she had any time to enjoy the spread of her remaining dusky brown feathers, or the feeling of being higher, of being  _ better, _ than the humans below her.

Folding her wings three quarters of the way down, she dove through one of the large hoops before pulling up and swooping through another two. If she wasn’t being forced to do it, Shayera thought that she might enjoy doing something akin to this in the future, if she ever escaped. Honing your skills while also having fun was entirely different from human experimentation. Oh, that’s right, metas weren’t actually humans, even though it was  _ literally in the name that they were. _

She risked a glance over at Wally on the treadmill. They couldn’t have him dying on them again.

Wally himself was terrified. Of course, he wasn’t about to show it to the pair of scientists who were creepily watching him run, but anybody would be scared after being forced to return to the place where you  _ literally died.  _ But he could do this. He knew that he could do this. If Wally could live in the same house as his dad for almost all of his life, then he could do what he did best, even if it was in a place that he could hardly be in the same room as without wanting to get as far away as possible.

“Faster,” one of the doctors watching him ordered.

Wally obediently picked up the pace, repeating over and over again in his head what would happen if he tried to slow down or stopped moving altogether. He wasn’t going to day today. Not again. Damn, his life was fucked up if he had to remind himself not to die.

* * *

“Take a two minute break,” the woman in charge of the obstacle course ordered. “Then repeat the course again.”

John let out a small sigh of relief and stretched out on the floor. He wasn’t going to move until every last second of those two minutes was up.

Someone poked his shoulder, and he cracked a green eye open. “What?”

“John,” Carol said softly, “get up. If they see you here, they’ll hurt you. I can’t-” She cut herself off for a second. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. Hal will kill me.”

She helped him to his feet, eyes faintly gleaming pink-purple. As soon as he was upright, John grabbed her shoulders and looked her directly in the eyes. Something was wrong. “Is Hal okay?”

“He’s alive,” she said simply. “Not unharmed, but alive. He told me to look for you, make sure that you were okay.”

“I’m fine,” John replied. “Tell Hal… I’m okay.”

“Time’s up!”

It had been the fastest two minutes of John’s life, but he wasn’t going to complain and get punished. At least now he knew that Hal and Carol, the only two people who he trusted to have his back when the world eventually ended, were alive. Maybe Hal was hurt badly, but he could heal. As long as they were alive.

They could get through this. They could get out of there.

Now he just had to do this obstacle course five-fucking-hundred more times until the stupid fucking scientists who were watching him was satisfied. Fan-fucking-tastic. 

* * *

Dr. Sivana marched down one of the many, many long corridors that led from room to room inside of the Meta-Max facility, heading towards one of his fellow scientists. In fact, he was heading towards his rival-they may have both had the same common goals, but they were far from friends. Dr. Sivana disliked him even more than he disliked T.O Morrow, and that was saying something considering how many of his nerves the robot-building scientist always seemed to get on.

He knocked on the door before letting himself in. There was a limit to his patience, after all.

“Thaddeus,” Hugo Strange greeted. “To what do I owe this surprise visit?”

Dr. Sivana held out a file. “The simulations are running as planned, although we have come up against some… Unforeseen difficulties.”

“What  _ kind _ of difficulties?” Strange asked, narrowing his eyes and raising his eyebrows.

“Subjects #1192, 1003, 1555, 1556, 1557, 1558, and 1559 are all… Uncooperative, to say the very least. I’m sure that you saw the security tape from their cell?” The question was mostly rhetorical-almost every scientist in the entire place had seen the security footage of their five new subjects and two old ones. “We should separate them. There is  _ no _ advantage to keeping them together.”

“The advantage is that they will stay alive for longer if they believe that they will be able to escape at the end of it all,” Strange said, opening the files. “A living subject is better for study and far more valuable than a dead one. Which is one of the reasons why you’ve been demoted.”

Dr. Sivana scowled but kept his voice even. “Yes, I know.”

Strange shut the files and set them down on his desk to look at them later. “And what about Subject #1333?”

“Still nothing new,” Dr. Sivana said, passing the last file, the thickest out of all of them, even the thickest of the seven previous ones, which was the one marked as #1003. “But Kadabra”-his mouth twisted in disgust at the mention of the name-“thinks that we’re making actual progress with it.”

“Hmm,” Strange murmured, flipping through the most recently added papers. They held information that most people would find useless; eating habits, the exact times that the subject moved and what they were doing while they moved, and even the exact words that the spoke-when they spoke at all, seeing as how it was mostly to themself and and never to anything actually sentient. “Does he, now? Send our friend Kadabra over to see me.”

“Now?”

“Yes,  _ now,  _ Thaddeus.”

Dr. Sivana nodded and started to back out of the office before he was stopped by Strange, who handed him a paper. “Here. I don’t know if you knew, but we’re going to start the toxin trials on them today after they fall asleep.”

For the first time that day, Dr. Sivana let a small, slow smile spread across his features. “Of course. I will notify Crane immediately.”

* * *

Wally slumped down on the wall, exhausted. Across from him, John and Clark flopped down on the ground. J’onn sat cross-legged on the not-cement. Diana and Shayera leaned against each other, while Bruce sat by himself in the corner.

“All those in favor of not talking about anything and just falling asleep, say ‘aye’,” John mumbled.

He got six “ayes” and one grunt from Bruce, which was good enough for him.

All seven of them were asleep within minutes, although it took Bruce slightly longer. He couldn’t shake the foreboding feeling that something was going to happen that night. And that it was going to be bad.

They woke up with the lights off, leaving them in pitch darkness, and a sickly sweet smell invading their nostrils.

Clark immediately started gagging, and Shayera, still dazed from sleep, began to flap her wings as hard as she could (and to the best of her ability in such a small space) to try to get the mysterious gas away from her face. Diana and Bruce pulled their shirts up over their mouths and noses with J’onn following their lead, and John formed a small green bubble of clean oxygen around his mouth. Wally, however, while fast at pretty much everything else, had always been slow to wake up, even while living on metahuman-unfriendly streets where doing that would get you killed pretty quickly. This meant that he got several lungfuls of the gas before anybody else.

He started coughing as his heart began to pound, brain going into overdrive. Scooting backwards until he was pressed against the wall, he closed his eyes and gripped his red hair against the familiar shadowy figures advancing on him from all sides.

As Shayera swiveled to see what was wrong, she too inhaled the gas. In an instant, one of the doctors seemed to advance from the whitish fog, wielding a scalpel and what looked almost like a butcher knife. As she struggled to get away, hundreds of invisible hands grabbed one of her wings and opened it. The metahuman girl realized what was about to happen moments before the knife’s blade sank into the feathery base of her wing.

Tiny, unseen vents at the top of the room opened up, clearing the room of the gas in seconds. Leaving behind two screaming teenagers and five confused young metahumans.

“I've got Shayera, you take Wally,” John called to Bruce, who nodded after tentatively taking a breath of clean air. Diana crawled along beside him, keeping her body low to the ground in case Wally perceived her as a threat. After looking at each other, J’onn and Clark joined John with Shayera. 

Neither of them would stop screaming.

John started gently stroking Shayera’s wings, trying to calm her down. J’onn looked on helplessly, wanting nothing more than to reach into her mind and make the hurt go away. Clark grabbed her wrists to stop her from clawing at her own skin, and J’onn decided that he could help with that. He wasn't  _ completely _  useless without his powers.

Bruce tried to rest his hand on one of Wally’s shoulders, but the younger teen flinched away with a small cry. He clearly wasn't lucid, at least not on this plane of existence. But whatever he was seeing, he believed that it was real. And that was one of the reasons why Wally’s next words made his blood boil.

“I'm sorry!” He cried, curling against the wall in anticipation of a blow. “I won't do it again, Dad, I swear! Please, I promise that I won't do it again! I didn’t mean to-!”

Diana reeled back with wide eyes, falling back onto her heels. “Is he…?”

Bruce didn’t give her any time to finish her sentence before he punched the wall, rubbing his fist. “Ow. Don’t do that,” he added, just in case Diana was thinking of following his lead. “But… Yes. I think that he is.”

Across the room, John yelped and dodged a punch as Shayera threw one at his head the minute that she managed to rip her arm free from Clark’s grip. J’onn waved a hand, causing the arm to press itself back against the wall. That just made Shayera freak out even more, and the winged girl kicked Clark in the stomach  _ (hard)  _ trying to break away from the telekinetic grasp.

“I cannot hold her for much longer,” J’onn warned. 

John nodded. “I’ve got it. Let her go… Now!”

As soon as the female metahuman had been freed, she immediately tried to rip Clark’s head off. It didn’t really work considering his nigh-indestructible skin, but Shayera was immensely strong, and anybody would find it painful to have fingers wrapped around their neck. But before he could gasp for air for any longer than a few seconds, something bright green and translucent encased Shayera’s arms and legs, pulling her against the wall using chains made out of light.

None of the five teenagers who had been unaffected by the gas knew how long it was before Shayera stopped trying to kill anybody who came near her and Wally stopped pleading with the invisible people that stalked his nightmares, most notably his father but occasionally screaming about going too fast and being unable to slow down. Shayera snapped out of it first, albeit gradually. Bruce decided that she must have inhaled less than the redheaded boy who was still covering away from his and Diana’s hands.

Currently, Shayera was sitting in the corner as John kept her calm, running her hands over her feathered wings as if she were trying to make sure that she was still there. The teenage boy was trying to keep her distracted as well, forming light constructs in the shape of humans, animals, everyday objects, and fantastical beasts from fairy tales. Every few seconds he would sneak a worried glance over at Wally, Bruce, and Diana, clearly just as upset about the things that the speedster was saying as the others.

By the time that Wally was lucid enough to be at the very least vaguely aware that what he was seeing wasn’t real (at least not at that time, seeing as how everyone except for J’onn (and only because he wasn’t entirely sure about the concept of whatever it was that Wally was screaming about) knew that the teenage metahuman was reliving something from their past), Bruce and Diana had calmed down enough to actually ask him what he was seeing. That didn’t keep the anger out of Bruce’s voice.

Wally cringed away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We heard you,” Diana said gently. “We want to understand what exactly it was that you were seeing.”

The redhead’s bright green eyes flicked over their shoulders as if there were someone looming behind them and clenched his teeth. “It’s not important,” he muttered. “‘Specially because it wasn’t real.”

“You were asking your father not to hurt you,” Bruce growled. “That is not  _ nothing.” _

In the corner, Shayera carefully crept away from the wall with John hovering (not literally) over her shoulder. Clark and J’onn followed, sandwiching Wally in between them, although while Clark was actually touching the redheaded speedster (at least for a moment, because he scooted away quickly until he wasn’t touching anybody) J’onn kept his distance.

They sat in silence for a long, long time.

Wally and Shayera didn’t even notice when they fell asleep.


	5. We Were Never Welcome Here, We Were Never Welcome Here At All

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I haven't updated in so long! Busy. And I forgot.

When Shayera woke up, she was being touched. By  _ everyone. _

John was curled up against one of her wings, which she had subconsciously spread over him like a feathered blanket. Clark had one hand on her arm. A single one of J’onn’s long green fingers was resting on her hand. Diana’s leg was pressed against hers, as was Bruce’s, although with lighter pressure and to a far lesser extent. Wally was snuggled up to her side.

Speaking of Wally, everybody had some body part touching him, too. It was almost… Cute, how they thought that they were trying to protect her (and Wally) from the things that went bump in the night.

She remembered what had happened the night before vividly, the things that she had seen and what they had done. It didn’t make her feel any better to know that it hadn’t been real, seeing as how quite a bit of it was just putting different different spins and new fiendish twists on things that had already actually happened to the winged metahuman teenager.

But they’d tried never cut off her wings, even if one of the scientists had threatened to do it before. 

As she stirred into wakefulness, the others started to wake up too. While Bruce and Diana were up within seconds and J’onn, John, and Clark were at least beginning to shake off dreamland, Wally just groaned and wrapped his arms tighter around Shayera’s waist, burying his face into her side. The girl froze, looking down at him with wide golden eyes. The speedster didn’t appear to realize exactly how close his face was to her breasts, but if he looked up now than she would never live it down.

John looked at her and Wally, unable to suppress a small laugh. Wally made a faint burbling sound at the noise, shoving his was even further into Shayera’s ribs. She gave him a panicked look. 

“Get him off!” Shayera hissed, being careful not to speak too loudly. “Do you have any idea how insufferable he’s going to be if he wakes up and we’re like this?!”

Bruce sighed and stood up, carefully pulling the skinny redhead away without waking him up. “I’ve got it-uh!”

He let out a small sound as Wally immediately curled up to him instead, wrapping his thin limbs around the older teenager. Diana couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the sight, causing Bruce to glare at her as he hefted the still-somehow-sleeping Wally. Clark clapped a hand over his mouth, muffling his chuckles as J’onn frowned and tilted his head, not understanding what was so funny.

Without any further ado, Bruce dropped Wally on the ground.

He awoke as soon as he made contact with the floor, all of the air flying out of his lungs and leaving him breathless. That alone would have been fine-god knew that he had had far ruder awakenings before-but he also landed on hard on his shoulder. Yes, the same shoulder that had been shot by Hunters and still had the bullet in it somewhere, which now hurt like  _ bitch.  _ “Ow!” His hand automatically went his shoulder. “Ow, ow, ow, ow,  _ ow!” _

Shayera crouched down beside him. “Are you okay? Bruce didn’t drop you  _ that  _ hard.”

“My shoulder got hurt when I was captured,” he muttered with a grimace. “But I heal fast. I’ll be okay in a second.”

“If you got hurt while you were being captured, it shouldn’t still be injured,” Bruce pointed out.

He looked at the ground and mumbled something unintelligible to anybody but Clark, whose blue eyes went wide as he stared at the younger boy in shock and disbelief. “You have a bullet in your shoulder?!”

“Maybe. But it’s not like it’s bleeding or anything. I’ll be fine, it’s just that the wound healed over with the bullet still on the inside.”

“It can still get infected,” Bruce said, kneeling down beside Wally despite his protesting. He nodded to John, who clenched his fist and formed a set of handcuff-like constructs of green light that pulled Wally’s hand away and tugged the other one behind his back when he moved them to cover it up. Bruce tugged Wally’s shirt down away from his collarbone, making the freckled boy smile as the older metahuman inspected his shoulder.

“I knew that you couldn’t resist me,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows.

Bruce strongly considered slapping him in the face, but decided against it. Instead, he pressed his hand against the puckered scar on the flecked skin. Wally winced and tried to tug his arm away.

When Bruce stood up, he gestured to the other five to stand at the other end of the room, as far away from the speedster as possible. Wally squirmed angrily. “Hey! I’m right here!”

Diana looked at Bruce and spoke in a low whisper. “Are you going to…” At his nod, she sighed. “Is it safe?”

“It’ll hurt,” he admitted, before looking at John. “Although if we use one of the light constructs, it’ll be more sterile than anything that I can steal from one of the scientists.”

“What are you two talking about?” Shayera asked, crossing her arms. When the two looked at her meaningfully, it dawned on the winged metahuman. She paled. “No. Oh no. I am not-we are  _ not _ doing that. Do you have any experience whatsoever?! No!”

“I’ve done it before.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Shayera snarled. “It’s too much like what I’ve seen those monsters do, and I’m  _ won’t  _ help you.”

John, J’onn, and Clark looked back and forth like they were watching a tennis match. Wally, meanwhile, was growing more and more frustrated with each passing second. He had heard Shayera’s outburst, but that didn’t mean that he understood what was going on. Bruce and Diana obviously wanted to do something (probably not something that he would like) to him because of the bullet that was stuck in his shoulder, but he had no idea what.

Bruce spun around to face him with a small glare. “Take off your shirt. Now.”

The light construct binding on his wrists disappeared, and Wally tucked them behind his back with a small smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “So forward? We haven’t even had our first date!” When Bruce didn’t look amused, his fake smile faded. “Fine.”

He tugged off his shirt, revealing scrawny shoulders and every single one of his ribs. There were several scars lining his skin, some of which looked suspiciously like they had come from broken glass-the edge of beer bottle, if Bruce had to hazard a guess. One of the speedster’s hands covered one of the spots on his ribs, down towards his stomach, and an odd shape that looked almost like a letter was peeking out from one side. Bruce crouched down and touched his hand, giving Wally a severe look. 

The younger metahuman looked down before moving his fingers and palm away with a soft sigh. Slashed roughly into the pale skin was one word.

_ Freak.  _

“There’s another one on my back,” Wally said softly. “Only that one says ‘ _ worthless’.” _

Bruce strongly considered punching the wall again, but decided against it so that he wouldn’t spook the redheaded teenager anymore than was necessary. “Okay,” he said instead in a low voice that he was unable to keep the growl out of. “Wally, we’re going to have to cut the bullet out of your shoulder.”

Wally paled. “Oh,” he said in a thin, small voice. “Oh.”

“If we leave it in there, and it keeps getting moved around, then it might damage the nerves or the muscles. It could even get infected. But if we cut it out using one of John’s light constructs, which would be much more sterile than something like a stolen scalpel, then your healing will kick in the same way that it did when you were shot in the first place,” Bruce explained. “I’ve done it before to Diana”-the girl nodded and pulled up the bottom of her shirt to reveal a roughly circular scar on her side, just underneath her ribs-“and I know that it’s going to hurt, but it’s a necessary pain.”

Wally closed his eyes for a moment and swallowed audibly before opening them again to reveal that they were filled with determination. “Alright. Let’s do it.”

He may have passed out from the pain midway through the procedure, which was done using a combination of a light construct knife and J’onn’s telekinesis, but none of the others were going to judge Wally for it. They probably would have done the same. Well, Bruce wouldn’t have, but only out of pure stubbornness, and Diana hadn’t when the bullet was cut out of her, but the rest of them would’ve .

* * *

From a small dark room full of cameras, Dr. Sivana watched with detached interest. He knew that he wasn’t really supposed to be watching them-his own assignment for that day was much more important that seeing how the five new test subjects would interact with their two older ones. No, he had someone else to observe.

Dr. Sivana turned his attention to the small, huddled shape of a young boy in a small cell. His blue eyes stared at nothing and his black hair was slicked with sweat. Dr. Sivana smiled, but there was no real joy to it.

#1333 may have been young, but it was their greatest success yet in terms of harnessing the metagene.

Luthor had paid a great deal of money for him, and Dr. Sivana would be damned before he let one of his boss’s favorite pets escape.

* * *

“Are you okay?”

John looked at Shayera. “Huh?”

“You’re just staring off into space,” she pointed out. “Are you okay?”

The metahuman boy sighed. “I-I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t think I am.  _ Nobody  _ has ever escaped from a Meta-Max. We’re kidding ourselves if we think that we can. I’ve known people-metahumans who got caught. I didn’t think that I would ever be one of them, and even if I was, I assumed that Carol and Hal would be okay. I didn’t think that they could ever get caught. And now we’re all stuck here.”

“You don’t know that nobody has ever escaped,” Shayera pointed out. “I may have been here for a long time, but I know that there are more facilities that I haven’t been moved to yet. And if anybody escaped, of  _ course  _ none of the Hunters or Luthor would broadcast it if they did. They don’t want to look bad in front of the public. Hell, maybe we’ll be the first, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll  _ never  _ get out of here. God knows that I’ve thought about that enough times. But we can’t stop trying, because that would be letting them win.”

John looked at her sideways out of the corner of his green eyes. “You’re pretty good at pep talks, you know?”

“I’ve been giving them to myself for the past five or six years, so I’ve gotten pretty good at it.” She huffed out a small laugh and opened one of her wings, lightly slinging it over his shoulder. “Besides, it can’t hurt to think positive.” At his disbelieving look, she shrugged. “What? I can be positive.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” John said teasingly with a small shrug.

Behind them, Bruce and Diana were leaning against the wall with a still-unconscious Wally in between them. Diana sighed. “Do you ever think that we’re going to die here?”

“All of the time,” her friend replied honestly. “But if we don’t try…”

“I know,” she whispered, looking down at her hands. “Even if it is useless.”

From the space in between the pair, Wally let out a small mumbling sound and stirred into wakefulness. “Be quiet,” he muttered, words starting to slur. “I’m tryin’ to sleep.”

Diana nudged him with her elbow. “You’re going to have to wake up eventually, you know that? It’s better to do it now than get woken up later by someone like Dr. Sivana. Or another one of their… Whatever that awful gas was.”

“I don’t know, but I think that it makes you face your worst fears, all while it tricks your brain into believing that what you’re seeing is real,” Bruce said quietly. “Your mind and body starts to react as if you’re in a fight or flight situation, and the more that you fear, the more that the gas causes you to react.”

“Well, that sounds fun,” Wally sighed, rolling his eyes. “You’re a regular ray of sunshine, aren’t you?”

J’onn, who was hovering cross-legged in the air a few feet above the not-cement ground, cracked open one of his eerie bright red eyes. “I cannot believe that you are just noticing that fact now.”

Everybody immediately stopped what they were doing (which was mostly just either trying to sleep or talking quietly with each other) and stared at him. Wally broke the silence with a shocked sound.

“You guys all heard that, right?!” He was on his feet in a flash, pointing at J’onn with wide eyes. “He just made a joke. An  _ actual  _ joke. One about  _ him.  _ All of you heard it, right? You guys can back me up on this.”

“We heard it, Wally,” Shayera agreed, blinking her golden eyes at the green-skinned metahuman boy. “We’re just having a little bit of trouble processing it. I guess that I was wrong about you, J’onn. You do have a sense of humor. You just choose not to utilize it until it’s time to knock all of us over and make all of us question our very existences.”

J’onn wrinkled his eyebrows and tilted his head to one side. “I do not understand why you are all surprised by this.”

Wally gasped and threw his arms up into the air, ready to explain exactly why this was so earth-shattering-but was interrupted by the door opening.

Instead of Dr. Sivana and a few guards for the purpose of ‘escorting’ them, the people that stood in the doorway all looked like they must have been goons hired for the express purpose of having hired muscle that wouldn’t ask too many questions. One of them, the man at the very front of the group who looked like he could have broken John’s neck with one hand, pointed at Wally, Diana, and Bruce. “You’re coming with us.”

“Um, which one?” Wally piped up nervously. “‘Cause you kinda just pointed to three of us, and I get that we’re all super attractive”-Diana elbowed him in the ribs, making him wince-“but you’re going to need to be more specific.”

The leader snapped his fingers, and, in a choreographed motion that  _ must _ have been practiced at least several times beforehand (because there was just no other way for all of them to pull it off like that) all of the men managed to squeeze into the cell. Shayera hissed and puffed up her feathers, ready to punch the shit out of anybody who got too close to her, while J’onn dropped down to the ground and folded himself up into the corner, somehow making himself small enough to fit without the use of any shapeshifting ability. 

In the ensuing commotion, Diana was the only one who noticed that Bruce was the one who was taken.

Well, other than Bruce himself, who found himself being marched down the hallways with his arms held tightly behind his back.

For most people, this would be a cause for at least some concern, and, really, it was. But Bruce also had more important things to focus on, like the fact that this was a new hallway that he now had to memorize if they ever wanted to escape from this government funded hellhole. And he didn’t have the most impressive metahuman abilities, all things considering. Someone like Shayera, J’onn, or Clark would be a much more valuable test subject.

That was when he heard an all-too-familiar sound.

That of a gun’s safety being clicked off.

He reacted on the impulses that had become near-instinct through years of training himself to ingrain the skills into his head-and Diana’s, too. Spinning on his heel before any of the others could blink, he pushed the man who had taken off the safety up against the wall, one arm (the one with the gun) twisted behind his back at such an angle that Bruce could break his arm in a second if the need arose.

There was another  _ click _ , and this time he wasn’t fast enough to avoid the hard metal that was jabbed against the spot where his head met his neck. Bruce stopped moving, freezing in place as his dark blue eyes glared at the man whom he had pinned to the wall. “Make one more move that isn’t stepping away from him and then holding your hands out in front of you,” the gun-wielding person behind him growled into his ear, “and I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”

Bruce slowly stepped away from his captive, letting the man dart back around him and rub at his wrists, muttering to himself about how he deserved a pay raise for putting up with this metahuman bullshit. The person behind him with the gun grabbed one of Bruce’s wrists, pulling it behind his back and clipping something metallic around it before doing the same to the other one. They didn’t feel like handcuffs, and they weren’t attached to each other, so he wasn’t entirely sure what they were supposed to do.

That was when he realized that he couldn’t feel his powers.

It wasn’t like knowing that they were there but being unable to use them (which was how Clark and J’onn had both described what wearing an inhibitor collar felt like), and more like… More like they were just plain  _ gone.  _ Like they had once been there, but now they weren’t.

Whatever those bracelets were, they were certainly a step up from inhibitor collars. 

“Good. Now keep walking,” the man ordered, pushing the space in between his shoulder blades sharply with the gun. Bruce gritted his teeth but complied, ignoring the way that all of the guards were now pointing their guns, batons, or other miscellaneous weapons at him. He could just barely see the man behind him, the one who was threatening him with the gun, out of the corner of his eye, and recognized the shape of his face from a small band of mercenaries that he and Diana had both faced. In fact, they had been the ones to test the invulnerability of his companion’s wrists, and it had been this man himself who was shooting at them.

It appeared that he’d gotten a promotion.

Their destination ended up being a large room with a metal table in the center, a smaller side platform that branched off of it, a window with several scientists milling around behind it holding clipboards, and several ominous looking medical tools that gleamed sinisterly in the harsh artificial light.

He suddenly had a very, very bad feeling about this room, even more so when almost all of the guards left, leaving him alone with a man who looked every inch the part of an evil scientist and the man who had almost shot him in the skull.

Especially when he spotted the scalpel that the scientist held in his hand.

Stopping where he stood, Bruce bent his legs slightly and squared his shoulders. The man who had driven him here aimed his gun at the space in between his dark blue eyes. “Move,” he growled. “Or I'll make you.”

Beside him, the scientist sighed. “Really, Lawton, have you already forgotten that we need this one alive?”

“Alive,” he growled. “But not without a bullet or two in its skin.”

_ “Unharmed.  _ Get him on the table, Lawton. Now.”

The man sighed and took a step forward, and that was when Bruce lunged.


	6. But it's Who We Are, Doesn't Matter if We’ve Gone too Far

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not speak Greek or Spanish, and I’m using a translator for any non-English dialogue (not the ever-unreliable google translate). Although I have been copy and pasting them back into the box to translate them back for errors, apologies for any and all inaccuracies. Please tell me all of my errors so that I can fix them!

John watched nervously as Diana paced back and forth in their small cell. From what little that he knew about the metahuman girl, she did  _ not _ seem like the kind of person whose bad side you wanted to be one. He’d seen her and Shayera fighting side-by-side together against the guards, and the two could each be deadly if the so chose to be. Sure, his light constructs could hold them, but probably not for long, and they would murder him once they escaped.

He hoped that those men returned Bruce before she did something drastic.

Clark spoke up from the wall where he, too, was watching their fellow metahuman warily. “Diana? Maybe you should sit down.”

“No! If those  _ men”- _ she spat out the word like it was poison-“hurt my friend, then they will pay. In blood, if necessary.”

“I like the idea,” Shayera said with a smile, “and I’m definitely not someone who you should go to for anger management help, but… Even if I’m all for taking revenge, we still have to wait until the right moment. They’ll need him alive, so that’s how he’ll stay.”

_ For now,  _ she added silently.  _ They need him alive for now.  _ She refused to think about the very real possibility that they would stop needing him alive in the very near future.

That was when the door opened.

Without bothering to see if whoever was opening it was armed, Diana attacked. She slammed the person to the ground, locking her fingers on their throat before easily rendering them unconscious. Then the teenage girl was onto the next one, fists flying. That was when a baton (one that was thankfully  _ not _ electric) smashed into her jaw, sending the metahuman girl down to the floor. Before Diana could rise again, something else was tossed down on top of her, and the door was once again closed.

Diana carefully eased the pile of clothing and skin off of her- _ Bruce, _ John realized. So he wasn’t dead. That… That was good.

“You have a dislocated shoulder,” Diana said to him, and with a small start Shayera realized that he was still conscious.

“I noticed,” he replied, far too calmly for what they were discussing. “I think that one of my ribs is cracked, too. And there’s a first-degree burn on my lower left leg that’s about six inches long.”

Diana nodded and rolled up the tattered leg of his left pant leg. He hadn’t been exaggerating-there was, indeed, a large first-degree burn on his lower leg. Shayera made a small sound of sympathy which J’onn echoed as the green metahuman boy rested a hand on his ribs. John remembered how they had taken him down using that flamethrower-thing. Maybe he was susceptible to heat.

She looked around. “We don’t have anything here to treat it with, but at least I can put your shoulder back into place.”

She braced her hands, one behind and one in front. John clenched his jaw as he remembered the sickening sound that Hal’s shoulder had made once they pushed it back into place, the way that Carol had been forced to cover his mouth with her hand until he was practically suffocating so that the crew of Hunters searching for them aboveground (they had been hiding in the sewers, which were incredibly dark, smelled bad, and were way too small for doing something like putting a shoulder back into place) wouldn’t hear them and come down to investigate.

He thanked whatever deity that was up there that despite what other problems he had had in the past, and the large one that he currently had right then in the present, that he had never broken a bone or dislocated anything larger than his finger while on the run from the Hunters.

The limb made a horrible sound when it was pushed back into place, and all of them except for Diana were expecting Bruce to scream. But he didn’t, instead just scowling and rubbing it with his other hand.

“Why did they take you?” Wally asked, leaning forwards.

“I think,” Bruce said, with the air of someone being forced to admit something incredibly unpleasant, “that they were going to dissect me.”

_ “What?!” _ Diana snarled, drawing into herself. John automatically leaned away from the angry girl. “They were going to  _ what?!” _

“Dissect me,” Bruce repeated. He didn’t sound particularly bothered, but Diana could hear that, no matter what outward front he was projecting, he had been shaken up by his experience. “But they didn’t. I don’t think that they liked that I was trying to resist.”

Diana looked like she was ready to murder everyone, so Clark stepped forwards and rested his hands on her shoulders. “Calm down,” he said softly. “Breathe, Diana. Breathe. He’s… Well, not  _ fine,  _ but he’s okay now. It’s okay.”

Once the metahuman girl had calmed down enough to stop glaring at everyone other than Bruce who so much as looked at her, Clark made her sit down. “Okay,” he said, turning to Bruce, “tell us what happened from start to finish before Diana kills all of us.”

“She won’t kill you, she’ll just hurt you really, really, badly and then leave your body  _ για τα κοράκια.” _ Bruce crossed his arms, seemingly ignoring the pain that came with the action.

Wally blinked a few times. “Uh, what does that mean?” 

“Literally?” Diana grinned. “ _ ‘For crows.’ _ ”

“Charming,” the speedster muttered. Diana smirked, and Shayera gave her an approving look.

“What language was that?” J’onn asked. “I am unfamiliar with it.”

“My mother was Greek, so she taught me the language. I’ve been speaking it since I could talk, and learned it alongside English.” Diana looked proud. “It’s also a good way to keep people from knowing what you’re saying when you want to keep something a secret.”

Shayera looked at Bruce. “I’m assuming that you know it too?”

He nodded. “I knew a few basic words before I met Diana, and she taught me some of the rest. I’m not as fluent as she is, but I know enough to hold a proper conversation.”

“Cool. I only know Spanish,” Shayera said with a shrug.

_ “Soy bastante bueno en español, también,” _ Bruce said, turning to her.

_ “Agradable. ¿Qué otros idiomas lo sabes?” _ Shayera grinned. She hadn’t spoken Spanish in who-knew-how-long, and it felt nice to feel the familiar language rolling off of her tongue. 

“Outside of Greek and Spanish, I know how to speak Mandarin, Hebrew, American Sign Language, basic Igbo, Russian, Romanian, and German. But I only know how to read and write in German, Russian, and Spanish. I’m not completely fluent in any of them, though.”

Wally whistled. “I could barely finish my elementary literacy homework. How did you learn all of those?”

“Practice.”

“Back on topic,” Diana said, trying to bring the conversation back to where it had started, “what happened when they took you back there?”

“There was a man,” Bruce began, crossing his legs. “The same one that we fought in Fawcett City, remember? His last name is Lawton, although I don’t know his first name. He’s not a mercenary anymore.”

“I remember,” Diana said with a nod.

“The squad of guards that he was leading brought me to a room, down one of the hallways before taking two rights and then a left. I attacked one of the guards before Lawton stopped me and threatened to shoot me in the head if I did it again. We went to a room with a metal table and medical tools, and there was a scientist waiting there-Lawton called him Dr. Cizko later. He wanted to dissect me, so I went after him.” Bruce told his story in a flat voice, ignoring the way that Diana clenched her fists and scowled at the wall. “The other guards didn’t like that, so they attacked me.”

“But they didn’t  _ actually  _ dissect you, right?” Diana pressured.

Bruce shook his head. “No.” Seeing that she still wasn’t convinced, he added,  _ “Είμαι καλά. Υπόσχεση. Εγώ δεν θα σας πει ψέματα.” _

Whatever that meant, it made Diana relax with a small nod. “Alright.”

“Be glad that they did not dissect you,” J’onn said softly. “They do not always believe in using anesthesia.”

All of the froze and stared at him. Clark swallowed audibly. “They… The scientists dissected you?”

“I-yes. Yes, they did.” J’onn bowed his head. “My shapeshifting allows me to heal quickly, and they did all of it before they gave me the inhibitor collar.”

“That doesn’t make it right!” Wally burst out. He hugged his shoulders as everyone turned to look at him. “It doesn’t make it right…”

_ “Γαμημένο μαλάκες,” _ Bruce hissed venomously. Whatever he said, Diana obviously agreed with, because she nodded while glaring icily at the wall behind John’s head. The light manipulator was suddenly glad that he wasn’t on her bad side-while he had hoped that she would have calmed down some now that Bruce was here, she seemed like she was twice as enraged now. And it seemed as if her silent anger was better than her loud rage.

“I don’t know what you said, but if it was an insult than I agree wholeheartedly. They’re all _ hijos de puta,” _ Shayera said in agreement. “Hopefully that means roughly the same thing.”

Bruce shrugged. “They’re both insults, and I think that that’s all you were really asking.”

“Yup.” She looked at J’onn. “I’m really sorry that that happened to you. That’s… That’s really fucked up, man.”

He didn’t look up and kept studying his green-skinned hands. “Thank you. I am just happy that it has not yet happened to any of you.”

“You’re not the only one,” Diana murmured. She looked at Clark, who nodded solemnly. Shayera shuddered, Bruce clenched his jaw, Wally curled one of his hands into a loose fist, J’onn looked away, and John shook his head slowly.

“You hear the stories,” he began, face blank and his voice filled with rage, “about what happens when they catch you. What Luthor does to metahumans when they won’t bow to his will and submit to his every whim. And-and you think that some of them  _ have  _ to be exaggerations. That of course they can’t all be true. Because why would he do that? They say that he’s a leader, of course he has to take charge, so he’s fixing our country by getting rid of the threats. But he wouldn’t do anything inhumane. You assume that just because he’s doing all of these things to us, all of these tests, there are some lines that he won’t cross. And then you hear stories like  _ that.” _

Wally nodded in agreement. “There are some things that nobody should do. I thought that even a scumbag like Lex Luthor would have something that he was unwilling to do.”

“I guess you were wrong,” Bruce stated. He closed his eyes before opening them. “J’onn, how old were you when they dissected you?”

Clark opened his mouth to tell the other boy that he shouldn’t just  _ ask  _ that, because it would probably bring up painful memories-both literally and metaphorically speaking, but he was interrupted by J’onn’s answer, which made him fall silent.

“I do not know, but I would estimate that I was around six or seven years old the first time, and seven or eight the second.”

Wally turned a sickly pale shade of green. Shayera gaped. John made a small sound. Diana growled.

“How-how  _ dare  _ they,” she snarled. “How dare they harm any living being in that way? Especially one of my friends? Those-those-!” She was clearly struggling to find words strong enough to describe her hatred of the scientists and Lex Luthor.

Clark nodded in agreement, looking only a little bit less ill than Wally. “I-I never thought that… I always assumed that they were lying about some of it…”

Shayera punched the wall, making a dent in the not-concrete before wincing and rubbing her split and already-starting-to-bloody knuckles. Her golden eyes glared up at the small camera, and through it at the man who was watching them. (They didn’t know it, but it was the same Dr. Cizko who had been about to dissect Bruce-he had been the overseeing assistant scientist for J’onn’s dissection as well.)

“Do they know that we’re human?” Wally asked softly. “Or do they think that just because we have these abilities-these  _ powers- _ that we’re just somehow less than them? Don’t they see the way that we think, the way that we communicate, the way that we  _ bleed,  _ is just the same as the way that they do?”

Clark got the feeling that he wasn’t just talking about the scientists and the Hunters. “Was your…”

The speedster nodded, gaze lowered at the floor. “He didn’t like metahumans much. Said that we were freaks of nature and insults to God. But I think that he liked that I could heal so quickly. Made it easier to cover the bruises, y’know.” There was a small tremor in his voice that he was obviously trying to hide. “And it must have worked-I mean, it’s not like anybody ever caught on. I think, when I finally ran away, they just assumed that it was for some other reason. ‘M pretty sure that my aunt and uncle knew, though. They were the only ones who actually cared about me, anyways.”

It was like a pair of floodgates had been opened-now that they were, there was no stopping the torrent of words that poured from the mouth of their youngest member. They started to blend together, and soon the others had to do several serious mental gymnastics to try to keep up with his words. He told story after story, tales of matches extinguished on pale freckled skin, broken beer bottles slashed through flesh, fists and slurred, angry words. Bruce realized what he was doing, maybe even before Wally himself did; he was telling them about his own pain to distract from theirs, so that they would stop being hurt. He may have meant to tell them stories that were fictional when he began, but there was no denying their truth now.

So Bruce responded, telling a story that only Diana had heard before. About gunshots in the night and blood on cement, about a burst of strength and speed and the need to  _ run away.  _ About a warm girl who spoke in an unfamiliar language who was even stronger than he was. Bullets raining down from on high, some of them only barely deflected away while one even managed to strike its target and sink into their skin. About green scales that shone dark emerald through layers of grime and water in a sewer system.

And then Diana began where he left off. Speaking fondly of warm sand and sun, crystal clear waters that shone blue. About the strange people that came from far away, bringing with them the news of first registration, then capture. About the way that her mother’s voice broke when she screamed for her to run. About the hail of bullets that marked her birth from one world into another. About a boy with hard blue eyes who saved her life, before she could save his in return. Of running and hiding and growing closer to each other. Of taking refuge from the Hunters in a city where only the worst would enter, before being captured by a man-beast hybrid with claws and a tail.

That was when Shayera started up, as Diana’s voice began to fail her. She waved her arms and flapped her wings expressively, telling a tale of a winged boy who had saved her life only to take a bullet in the brain, of her mother smoothing down her feathers one last time before telling her to get as far away from home as possible. Of flying for the first time in a desperate bid for freedom, only to be brought back down to earth again by a squadron of Hunters. The winged metahuman girl spoke bitterly of tests and experimentation, of brief bouts of forgetfulness before being able to recall the shape of her mother’s face or the name of the boy who had saved her-Katar.

When she had run out of melancholy tales, Clark began. Of being adopted by a pair of loving parents, raised as their own son. Of saving a young girl from a speeding car after a pair of older boys pushed her into the street right in front of it. Of bricks being thrown through windows, threatening notes stuck to their door. Attackers that went after his family in the small town where everyone knew each other. A man who befriended him, made him feel at home and safe while promising to keep his parents from harm-before he disappeared after forming a bond with Clark (although the boy never shared his mysterious companion’s name). About making the decision to turn himself in so that his family would be safe.

By the time Clark was clearly done, John was ready to take over. He growled about running away from home, where they didn’t particularly care about him, and then being found by a pair of metahumans with powers eerily similar to his own. About green and pink light shielding him before he knew how to properly use his abilities, bullets firing around them in a hail of metal rain. Hal’s flirting and Carol’s uncanny ability to make him stop and be serious. About that final failed attempt at getting life-saving supplies from a store. Being captured and stuck in a cell with Bruce and Wally before watching the redheaded boy almost die in front of him.

That was when J’onn began in his low, even voice. He spoke softly of test after test, of discovering his mental powers and entering a coma for a week while he was adjusting to them. Of the dissections. Of the fear that, for all he knew, he had been born feeling. The green-skinned metahuman spoke almost wistfully of the more minor tests, and his voice grew steadily stronger as he approached the present day. He finished with where they were now, ending his tale by concluding that he enjoyed the feeling of having friends. 

When he was done, everyone was silent. The seven looked at each other.

Bruce spoke first, blue eyes hard. “We  _ are _ going to get out of here.”

“How do you know?” John said bitterly. “It’s more likely that we’ll be trapped here forever.”

The other boy met his gaze. “We  _ will _ get out of here.”

Slowly, Clark held his hand into the middle of the circle. “But once we do, we’ll have to help the other metahumans who are trapped.”

A small smile appeared on Bruce’s face, but it was gone so quickly that Shayera wasn’t sure that it was even there in the first place. Diana, however, saw it and smiled back.

“You can count on it,” Bruce replied evenly.

“Well, I’m in,” Wally said, placing his hand on top of Clarks. Shayera raised her wings and chin before placing her own on top of the two. Next it was J’onn, who was simply following their lead (he had no idea what it was that they were doing). Then Diana and John set their hands on the pile, making eye contact and nodding. Bruce was last, and this time there was no mistaking that there was a small smile on his face.

“Let’s take Luthor down.”


	7. Doesn’t Matter If It’s All Okay, Doesn’t Matter If It’s Not Our Day

The scientists were upset about something.

It didn’t  _ seem _ like they were angry about any of their so-called ‘subjects’, although it was a well known fact that they pretty much always were. Instead, they seemed more frustrated by an outside source-something that they couldn’t keep under control.

Clark had assumed that it was something like a rogue guard or one of their superiors being finicky about the results of the metahuman tests again. Maybe it was even the order to remove the collar that they had given Bruce, restoring his powers. 

But it wasn’t. It was about the mercenary currently stalking the hallways.

They were resentful that Luthor had given  _ him _ more access than some of them had. But it wasn’t like they could just complain to Strange or Sivana or even Luthor himself-the man was terrifying. He could probably kill any of them in mere seconds. Not to mention all of the rumors; that he was actually just another metahuman eating out of Luthor’s hand (not that they would ever say that anywhere near his presence), that he had taken some sort of ‘super-soldier serum’ in order to become stronger and faster and more powerful, that he worshipped some dark god. Or maybe he was like the beautiful but deadly young woman (she was a teenager, really, but they had learned the hard way not to say that to her face) who sometimes came to the facilities on behalf of her father-a mysterious assassin from an outside source.

Yes, Deathstroke was a mystery. And so was the reason why he was so fascinated by the seven metahumans in Cell 345.

Many of them could understand the interest in #1003 and #1192 (those two had been there for quite a while, after all, and they were constantly discovering new things about them), but not the other five. Dr. Cizko had wanted to see what was inside of one of them, yes, but he was like that with all of the new meat. It wasn’t anything new at all for them. And maybe the nearly-indestructible one was worth looking into further as well, because just think of how useful it would be once it had been killed and they could see why it was so hard to break through and puncture. The same could be said of the wrists of one of the others, the phasing qualities of the redheaded one (how did they differ from those of #1003’s?), and the light constructs that the last could generate.

That was all beside the point. What mattered here was that Slade Wilson could go to any floor and do anything that he wanted, and nobody could stop him even if they wanted to.

Although even if they had the authorization to stop him, they wouldn’t dare. The last person who tried was… Well,  _ punished severely  _ would be an understatement of epic proportions.

* * *

Clark looked at the boy across from him doubtfully. “You’re sure that you want to do this?”

Bruce nodded, rising up onto the balls of his feet. “Positive. Attack me.”

Clark looked around to make sure that everyone was out of the way. Shayera and John were practically on top of each other in the corner to Clark’s back, with Wally somehow squished in between them. J’onn was hovering close to the ceiling, watching the proceedings with nervous interest. Diana was the only one outside of Clark himself and Bruce who seemed to be in a remotely comfortable position, as the teenage girl was leaning up against the wall in the corner behind Bruce with her legs tucked up, still looking completely at ease and at home.

“But I could seriously hurt you,” the boy said reluctantly. He was achingly aware of the fact that he had far too many powers for one person, and he often thought about the fact that he could seriously injure one of his friends without even really trying at the best of times. And now Bruce had requested to  _ fight _ him?

“Two of your powers are gone,” Bruce pointed out, nodding to the inhibitor collar around Clark’s neck, “and you don’t know how to fight. What if they manage to get rid of the rest of them, too? You’re not like the rest of us-you may have strength, but we’ve all fought before. Except for J’onn. And Diana already offered to teach him.”

The green metahuman looked a bit relieved, and Clark honestly couldn’t blame him. Bruce and Diana were both scary, yeah, but Diana’s was more of a constructive sense.

“Even though this place is too small to  _ properly  _ spar,” Diana added. “It would be better if we had someplace larger, but… This will do, at least for now.”  _ For now? _ At his obviously confused expression, Diana specified, “Once we get out of here and start taking down the Meta-Maxes, we’ll  _ all  _ need more training.” She looked at Bruce. “Not all of us are martial arts experts or were raised by warriors. And even those of us that are could always improve.”

Clark tried not to think about the damage that Bruce and Diana could do to them in a larger space and failed miserably. It involved a lot of broken bones and probably a corpse or two. Behind him, although he didn’t see it (but he could still hear it), Wally, Shayera, and John were whispering-placing bets, even if they had no money, on who would win and why. Clark was disappointed, although not entirely surprised, to find that none of them thought that he would win. He also wasn’t surprised that Shayera kind of sucked at judging how much non existent money was too much to pay for a small bet-she only had gotten enough of an education to barely read, write, and do simple math before she had to run away and then was captured.

“Are you two sure that this is a good idea?” J’onn asked from his place up in the air. “I do not wish to start any animosity between us. I have never had… Friends before. I do not want to lose them now.”

Diana smiled up at him kindly, and Clark marvelled at the way that she could go from being ready to fight to reassuring a friend that everything was okay in the span of a few moments. It wasn’t a bad quality by any means, but it was a strange one. It made her more powerful, he realized, the way that she could flit from laughing to fighting in a heartbeat. More unpredictable to her enemies and a stronger ally to her friends.

“Don’t worry,” she said softly. “As long as we’re together, we’ll all be fine. I’m not going to let anything hurt  _ any  _ of my friends.”

That was when Bruce’s fist came flying at Clark’s face, and he knew that he was doomed.

* * *

As it turned out, Wally wasn’t the only one whose speed limits were tested on the treadmill. Clark, Diana, and Bruce were all also assigned to use it, as well as various other metahumans whose names they didn’t know. Sometimes they even had to run at the same time, which was especially hard when Wally was one of the people. He was constantly in motion anyways, and he was always looking over at the scientists to see whether or not they were looking at him.

The day that one of them besides Shayera and J’onn was whipped for the first time, Bruce was running on the treadmill.

Beside him was a boy-seven or eight years old, roughly, with large blue eyes with dark bags under them and tangled black hair. His limbs were painfully skinny, and his body seemed to be barely holding itself together. The clothes that he was wearing seemed to be several sizes too small, but they still fit well enough due to his stunted growth. The boy wasn’t nearly as fast as Bruce was, but the scientists were still expecting him to run at the same speed as the older boy.

So, of course, the electrocution started.

It wasn’t coming up through the actual treadmill like it had before, presumably because they were satisfied with whatever Bruce was doing. Instead they used a small wand, jabbing it into the boy’s spine and arms as they saw fit. Bruce tried to keep the boy on one side of him, away from where the wand could get to him, but it was harder than it looked. Whenever he was hit, the kid would make a small sound of pain before continuing on, obviously completely used to that kind of rough treatment.

It was maybe the eighth (actually it was the ninth, but just because they had blended together for the boy didn’t mean that they had for Bruce) when the kid collapsed.

His legs just buckled, tears of silent pain filling his big blue eyes. He curled up automatically on his side, protecting his torso and vital organs, clearly expecting them to be targeted. As one of the guards advanced on him with a crackling baton on the order of the troupe of scientists, Bruce crouched down. Grabbing the boy’s upper arm, he managed to haul him up to his feet and pull him to the side, where he wouldn’t be as vulnerable to the electricity. “Come on,” Bruce muttered in his ear. “You have to keep going. What’s your name?”

“#1333,” the boy mumbled. His eyes stared straight ahead as he started to run again, shoulders slumped.

“That’s not a name, it’s a number. What’s your name?” Even J’onn had a name, although he had said that he had meant to call himself ‘John,’ but the doctor who he had named himself after (the only one that had ever been even marginally kind to him) had told him to distinguish himself somehow. “I’m Bruce.”

“I don’t have a name. I’m #1333. I don’t have a name. I don’t get a name. Metahumans don’t get names.” His voice was monotone, like he was repeating something that he’d heard over and over again until it had been seared into his brain. “Only real people get names. We get numbers, so that people will know that we’re not like them.”

Bruce gritted his teeth. “No, we can have names, too. Isn’t there anything that you want to call yourself?”

“I’m #1333, and that’s all I’ll ever be,” the boy said, like he couldn’t comprehend the fact that anyone would give him anything to call himself other than a number.

That was when the treadmill stopped moving and the scientists ordered them to freeze. The one who seemed to be supervising the project was once again Dr. Sivana, who had now completely healed (much to the ire of Diana and Shayera), and he curled his lip at the pair of boys. “Get down here, now. Both of you.”

As soon as the two were standing in front of him (Bruce had positioned himself so that he would be in front of the smaller boy, whom he refused to think of by his ‘number’ until he could think of an actual name), Dr. Sivana snapped his fingers. “Bring both of them to Cell #277. Leave them there with whoever is already inside, and maybe they’ll think about what they’ve done. I know that #1333 will.”

The younger boy’s eyes went wide and he started to tremble, backing up until he was pressed against the front of the treadmill. “Can’t. I can’t. I won’t.” He glared at the approaching hired muscle. “I  _ won’t!” _

By now, several of the other metahumans had noticed that there was a commotion over by the large treadmill, including Shayera, John, Diana, Wally, Clark, and J’onn. Shayera immediately swore under her breath and landed on the ground (she had been doing the obstacle course alongside Clark and a few others that she didn’t know the names of). She recognized that cell number-it was well known to any metahuman that disrespected the system in any way, shape, or form, even if they hadn’t meant to. She would know, seeing as how she had been there multiple times in the past.

The last thing that she saw before she was herded out of the room was a large cluster of guards approaching her friend, who stood protectively in front of a smaller child who was cowering away.

“What are they doing?” John hissed into her ear as he was pressed up against her by a bluish-skinned girl with white hair. “Why is everyone freaking out about that cell name?”

She elbowed him in the chest. “Because most of us have been there, dumbass. And once you have, it tends to stick with you for a while. That’s the only room in this whole place where any of us have ever been whipped, and it isn’t a very pleasant experience that most people want to repeat.”

John looked ill. “You mean they…”

“Are you really all that surprised?” Shayera snorted. “They’ve either dissected or  _ tried _ to dissect two of our friends, beaten us, electrocuted us, practically starved us, hardly ever give us anything to drink-and when they do it’s lucky that we don’t get sick because of how dirty it is, they work us until we collapse from exhaustion and then they make us keep going anyways, and I could keep going but I’m running out of breath.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Is whipping really that much of a stretch?”

“No, it just still surprises me how evil they are. It probably shouldn’t anymore, but…” John shrugged. “I guess, in my head, it’s easier to think of them as different from the Hunters. More human, I think. But their even worse in some ways? I don’t know, it doesn’t really make that much sense to me, either.”

He was interrupted by Diana, who was roughly shoved into the small space in between them by a particularly handsy guard that was honestly lucky that he wasn’t attacked on the spot. “Are we going back to the cell?” The slightly older metahuman girl asked. “I don’t recognize this hallway.”

“They’re probably trying to turn us around because we’re in such a big group,” someone said from by Shayera’s left wing. The girl jumped and jerked around to face whoever had spoken, mouth opened to admonish them for somehow surprising her. Instead, her jaw just stayed open-she knew that it was rude to stare at people (half-forgotten memories of her mother told her that much), but she just couldn’t help herself.

The girl at Shayera’s elbow was dressed in tattered clothes just like the rest of them, with curly dark brown-black hair that was pulled back by an almost-destroyed hair band. She was tall, with long legs and a slender form. But that wasn’t why Shayera (and John) were staring.

She didn’t have a face.

Instead, there was just smooth skin that pulled out into an incredibly simplistic nose. She didn’t have a mouth, either, so neither of the two metahuman teens knew how she had spoken. The girl sighed, and the surface below her nose (where her mouth should have been) moved along with it. “Are you two done staring?”

Shayera blinked. “Uh, yeah, sorry. I know that I really shouldn’t judge because I’ve got  _ these”- _ she flexed her wings-”and my friend is green, but… Sorry.”

John echoed her apologies. “What did you mean?”

“I mean that they’re obviously taking us somewhere. I think if there were less of us, they wouldn’t worry about us actually learning the layout of this place-figuring out where the exits are, and stuff like that. But because they had to move all of us at once for whatever reason, they’re trying to keep us away from our cells, at least for the time being.” She moved out of the way as Diana stepped forwards, somehow managing to avoid being trampled or being touched by anyone except for John.

Diana nodded to her in respect. “Smart thinking. What’s your name?”

“Renee. Renee Montoya. You?”

“Diana, and this is Shayera and John. Do either of you two know where they were going to take Bruce and that boy?” There was thinly veiled rage in her voice as she mentioned her friend. Shayera winced and opened her mouth to tell Diana the truth, hopefully in a way that  _ wouldn’t _ make her friend want to attack her and potentially rip down the building to find Bruce, but was beaten to the punch by John.

“Shayera says that whatever cell they’re taking him to is the one where they whip you.”

Immediately, Diana’s blue eyes lit up with hellfire and Shayera could have sworn that she could see sparks flying from them. The winged girl carefully set her hand on her friend’s shoulder before she could go berserk, sending John a small glare before giving Renee a small look that meant she might want to lose herself in the crush of metahumans before the conversation had a proper chance to escalate. “Hey, Diana, he’ll be fine. I could be wrong about where they’re taking him”- _ I’m not wrong,  _ she added mentally-“but even if I’m right he’ll still be okay. It may hurt like a bitch and suck a ton, but unless it draws blood and then gets infected we should be just fine. I’m sure that he’s done much stupider shit in the past than whatever made them go after him this time, right?”

Her shoulders sagged. “Yeah, I guess. But he’s family. Incredibly stupid family, sometimes, but he’s pretty much the only person in my life who has actually said that they’re going to stay and then  _ done _ it. I mean, people say that they will all of the time, even if they never actually do.”

“I’m pretty sure that almost everybody here can relate to that,” John said, patting Diana’s back. “Now, come on. We have a speedster, a green kid, and Clark to find.”

After nodding to Renee, the trio cut through the throng of metahuman teenagers, children, and young adults with relative ease. Although the did have to dodge several crackling batons wielded by the guards that were herding them-the didn’t seem to care who they hit, as long as the weapons made contact with something solid. Diana noticed with some surprise (and… Not happiness, per say, but maybe pride?) that a few of the older ones were assisting the smaller children; lifting them up and out of the way of the tangled limbs and angry goons that looked for any excuse to hurt them. She even accepted a small dark-skinned boy with webbed fingers and a neck lined with gills from one of the others, who had pale green skin and long hair like flickering flames.

“Do you know where they’re taking us?” Said girl asked nervously as she picked up a small girl with broad leathery red wings and scarlet skin. “They’ve never done this before.”

“I don’t know,” Diana admitted. “I haven’t been here for very long.”

The girl inclined her head. “I’m sorry that you were caught.”

“I could say the same for you.” Diana looked down at the small boy in her arms, who was staring up at her fearfully with wide grey eyes. “Hello, little one. What is your name?”

“That’s Kaldur’ahm,” the green girl said, moving the red girl in her arms to avoid an elbow. “I’m Beatriz. We share a cell-#238, I think. We’re with someone else, a girl named Tora Olafsdotter. White hair, pale skin. Have you seen her?”

“I don’t think I have, sorry. Did you know her… Before?”

Beatriz shook her head. “No. But there are some things that make people stick together, and this is one of them.”

“Stop!”

The entire group froze in place, responding to the loud order from the cluster of guards. Beatriz was almost pushed into Diana, who steadied her new friend(?) without dropping the small boy. As the guards started to walk among them, jabbing at them with the batons to split them into two different groups. When Diana realized that Beatriz was being split away from her, she passed Kaldur’ahm back over to her. The fiery-haired teenager mouthed a quick “Thanks” before Diana lost her in the mob of metahumans.

Someone stumbled into her, and she looked around only to spot a familiar freckled face.

“Sorry, it’s hard to see when everyone is pushing against each other-oh, hi Diana! Where’s everyone else?” Wally peered up at her with wide green eyes.

“John and Shayer were here a second ago,” Diana answered, “but I lost them. I don’t know where J’onn and Clark are, and Bruce…” She stopped talking, and Wally gently nudged her. He smiled softly, and she braced herself for flirting. But it didn’t come.

“I saw. He’ll be fine. Don’t worry, beautiful.”

Ah, there was the flirting.

One of the guards shoved her into an open cell, along with a suddenly-appearing Shayera, J’onn, Clark, and John. They ended up in a pile of limbs and Shayera’s wings on the floor. The other metahuman girl suddenly stiffened. “Whose hand is that?”

Wally yanked his arm away, looking nervous and blushing bright red. “Sorry.”

The next hour was filled with swear words and the light constructs that John was using to restrain Shayera, who was determined to murder Wally. The ginger speedster didn’t leave from his hiding place behind Diana, while Clark stood in front of both of them with his arms outstretched to grab his winged friend every time she escaped from John’s constructs.

When the door finally opened and Bruce was pushed through, he wore a triumphant expression despite the fact that there were marks up and down his arms, one of his eyes was swollen shut, and there was enough blood on his back to conceal the actual wounds.

Before anybody (Diana) could ask him what happened, he spoke.

“Billy,” he said, sounding satisfied. “His name is Billy.”

* * *

The second time that the scientists administered the fear gas, neither Shayera nor Wally were affected. Instead, it was Bruce, Clark, and J’onn. Bruce inhaled the most-he had made sure that Diana’s and Wally’s mouths and noses were covered before checking himself, inadvertently inhaling quite a bit of the gas. That was, in fact, the same reason that Clark was affected, although he was helping Shayera and John instead of Diana and Wally. Before he could make it to J’onn, however, he stated having the hallucinations. And J’onn himself was asleep, awaking after inhaling a mouthful of the sickly sweet smelling gas.

As soon as it had been dispersed by the vents at the top of the room and the air was once again safe to breath, Diana went for Bruce, Shayera went for Clark, and John and Wally went to J’onn. The thrashing green metahuman was making a high-pitched keening sound, which was a stark contrast with the silently-struggling Bruce and the growling Clark.

J’onn, at least, had a small advantage. His powers were mentally based-his brain could tell if he was being lied to, at least most of the time. So the hallucinations weren’t fooling him-he knew that they weren’t real, and that they couldn’t hurt him, but that didn’t make it any easier to watch as a masked scientist dissected his friends in front of him before turning the scalpel on J’onn himself. As a young metahuman that had once stood in front of him and taken the brunt of the heat from one of their flamethrowers (he had been resistant to fire) was drowned over and over again, in the same brutal way that he had been the first time.

The other two were not so ‘lucky.’ Clark watched his parents get attacked, brought down by a mob wielding knives, bricks, and broken bottles as they tried to drive him out. The man whom he had once thought of as a friend (how wrong he had been!) laughed in the background, taunting him with visions of his new friends in chains, all of them struggling to rise as they were crushed beneath the feet of the frenzied crowd. He saw the cousin that he only met once be decapitated, her blue eyes that mirrored his in shape as well as color staring blankly as though they blamed him for everything. Clark tried to beg for forgiveness, but instead he choked on a mouthful of blood. So instead he spat it out at the feet of the person responsible for their capture, the man that had once been the only person to actually treat him like a human being other than his own parents. 

Bruce saw his parents get shot once, twice, three times. Saw Diana’s neck be broken, a bullet wound end up in between John’s eyes, Clark drowning in a bubble of water suspended in the air by some strange machine, J’onn’s skin bubbling and blistering as he was burned alive, Shayera’s wings sliced off as she was tossed into the air and told to fly or else be impaled on the sharp steel spikes that jutted up out of the floor, and Wally beaten to death by hands that were almost the same as those that belonged to the redheaded boy himself. He saw the familiar face of a thief that had once saved his life split apart as its owner’s throat was sliced open. Little Billy, who had only just been given a name instead of a number for the first time, screamed in agony as his own power consumed him.

It was a long, long night for all of them.


	8. So Won't You Save Us From What We Are?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not very familiar with Barbara Minerva, and I'm bad at characterizing Renee Montoya. Please bear with me as I try to navigate these unfamiliar characters and their personalities, especially because I’ve never read Barbara (but she’s not a big part of it by any means) and while Renee is more familiar to me, I still haven’t read that much of her. But I think that I am going to mildly pair her with Kate Kane in this, who I’ll introduce more fully sometime (probably in the sequel) as part of a subplot.
> 
> This chapter is where we actually start to move the mostly-lost plot forwards again, and everybody realizes that it’ll be easier to actually start to work together to escape from the Meta-Max.

Renee Montoya was doing the obstacle course when she saw the strange trio of metahumans again. 

One of them was on the treadmill (the one with the wings, Shayera wasn't it?), while the African-American boy (John, she remembered) was ducking, dodging, and blocking bullets with strange translucent bright green energy shields. But the other girl, the pretty one with long dark hair and piercing blue eyes (what? Just because she wasn't actually going to date anybody in this hellhole didn't mean that she couldn't enjoy the view) was doing the course with her.

And, for some reason, she initiated a conversation.

“Do you have any cellmates?” The girl-Diana-whispered, glancing over at the scientists to make sure that they weren't eavesdropping. 

Renee nodded. “Yeah. She's a little rude, but all right once you get to know her. She's over by the weights right now, I think. The, uh, furry one with the tail.”

It was still a little bit awkward to describe her, although she  _ was  _ furry. And she  _ did _ have a tail. A cheetah tail, to be exact. Not a leopard. Renee had only made that mistake once, and she’d ended up with a set of razor sharp claws three centimeters away from her… Eyes. Where she saw from, anyways.

“What's her name?” The other girl asked.

“Barbara Minerva, but she prefers just her last name.” Renee paused as Diana made an approving noise. “What about you, any more other than the ones that you were with earlier?”

Diana nodded. “There are seven of us, so yes. Other than John and Shayera, there's also Bruce, Wally, J’onn, and Clark.”

“Where are they?” Renee asked. If Diana was flaunting the rules to talk to her, then the least that she could do was  _ keep  _ talking to her. “I know where Shayera and John are, but I don’t even know what the other ones look like.”

“Wally is by your friend Minerva, Bruce is the one with John and that other girl, Clark is on the treadmill, and J’onn is doing those hoops for the fliers,” Diana said as she gestured with one of her elbows to said suspended hoops. Renee nodded. She couldn’t fly, so she had never actually been forced to do them, but her old roommate, a young girl named Rachel who had been barely five years old when Renee first met her. She had been able to use shadow blasts, shields, and (in the words of the scientists) ‘dark teleportation’ as well as flight. The guards had taken her away one day, and Renee never saw her again.

“You two! Keep moving! We never ordered you to stop!”

Diana rolled her eyes at the other girl, then dove back underneath the frigid water that they were supposed to swim to in order to get to the submerged cement tunnel that they were supposed to swim through. It didn’t pose much of a challenge to some of the metahumans that Renee had met, however, seeing that some of them had gills and webbed fingers. The only reason that she was thinking about that was because she herself  _ didn’t  _ have gills, and even though her face was featureless she was still able to  _ breath  _ and do things that most people needed faces to do.

When she surfaced on the other side of the tunnel and took a deep breath of air, Diana bumped into her. It wasn’t that hard, just enough to put her slightly off-balance, but Diana still felt the need to reach out and steady her by grabbing her shoulders. The other girl’s mouth also ended up oddly close to Renee’s ear (she  _ did _ have ears, thank you very much), and the young metahuman barely managed to catch the words that Diana quietly whispered to her.

“Do you know the way to and from your cell?”

Renee nodded in reply just as the electrical baton made contact with the space just underneath her ribs.

* * *

The seven teenagers asked every metahuman that they could if they knew the way back to their cells, to the white room where they did  _ most  _ of their training (there were more training rooms, actually, but they didn’t go to those anywhere near as often as they went to the white room (which was actually called Room #670)), or to any of the other rooms and passages in the building. Most only knew how to get to and from their cells to the white training room, but that was still useful enough-anything that helped them, although mostly Bruce, Diana, and J’onn, build their mental maps of the Meta-Max where they were trapped.

Some of the ones that they asked (including Renee, Beatriz and her roommate Tora, Carol once John was able to ask her, and a young female metahuman named Helena Bertinelli whose powers were similar to Diana’s, although she could also ‘camouflage’ herself and blend into whatever she was standing in front of and she wasn’t as fast compared to the average human as she was, and there was no invulnerability and her flight was more like jumping) started to ask the same thing to anybody that they met when they hadn’t already been questioned by somebody else.

When they were returned to their cell at the end of the long, long days, the seven metahumans would pool whatever new directions they had learned in an attempt to build up their map of the facility. Due to the camera in the corner, they spoke as quietly as possible, mostly ignoring Wally’s loud protests that “We should use code words! That would be so cool!” Instead, they mostly just used either Spanish or Greek, taking their chances that whoever was watching them didn’t know the translations of what they were saying. Bruce and Diana even tried to teach the rest of them as much basic Greek as possible when they were near the others in the training room so that nobody would overhear them.

Wally and Clark were pretty hopeless at it, to be honest, and Shayera got frustrated too easily, while John just didn’t really have much of a knack for the language (he was acceptable with Spanish, though), but J’onn was excellent at it-Bruce suspected that it had something to do with his telepathic powers.

Speaking of J’onn’s powers, and more specifically the inhibitor collar that stifled the abilities of both him and Clark, a major part of the small piece of the escape plan that they had put together centered around unlocking the rest of them by getting rid of the collar. The powers that the scientists wanted to suppress were incredibly powerful, even more so than the ones that he could use while wearing the collar.

And that meant getting the keys.

Bruce had seen them used before when they were putting the inhibitor collar on Clark for the first time, as well as replacing the one that he had broken that J’onn had been wearing originally. They weren’t like the kind of keys that you would use for an actual lock, but it was more like a small translucent red plastic card with a number on it that matched the collar that was held up to a small bar on the side of it, and thus opened it so that it could be taken off.

Which meant that he needed to steal one. Two, actually. One for J’onn’s collar, and one for Clark’s.

Bruce didn’t know  _ how  _ he was going to get them yet, because the regular musclebound guards stationed outside their door-or at least the ones who regularly dragged them down the hallways to and from the training rooms-never seemed to have them. And he wasn’t going to ask about it. That would just get him separated from the others, whipped again, or worse.

He, Shayera, and J’onn weren’t the only ones to have been whipped now. Clark had been taken away for no apparent reason, but his near-indestructible skin protected him from harm. They were all pretty sure that it had happened to Wally after he was dragged away for hauling a small girl to her feet after she stumbled while they were both doing the obstacle course, but he refused to tell them, and with his enhanced healing it was impossible to tell. Well, it actually wasn’t if they asked him to take his shirt off, but Bruce was  _ not _ going to do that again because of the rampant flirting that would inevitably follow.

Back on the subject of the keys, Shayera thought that it would be easier to just grab one of the guards and force the information. She even offered to do it herself, which Bruce declined. Wally suggested letting himself get caught and then pocketing them at superspeed, which would probably have worked had it not involved letting someone get captured and the highly unlikely probability that he would even get caught by the very specific guard with the keys.

In the end, none of that planning mattered.

Because it was Clark who brought them the keys.

It didn’t happen like any of them would have expected it to if they knew that he would be the one to bring them. He was  _ Clark,  _ not someone who got caught and brought in. He may have helped people, but he did it quietly, trying not to draw attention to the fact that he  _ was  _ helping them-mostly for their sakes, seeing as how he knew that not everybody had skin as resistant against blades and whips as his was.

It just happened so  _ fast.  _ One moment he was there, flying through the hoops faster and faster as the scientist in charge demanded it, and the next a large squad of guards was marching him out of the room. Shayera paused in flight (she had been doing the suspended hoops too) to watch him go, making eye contact to let him know that if he needed backup, it would be her pleasure to bust more than a few skulls. The small head shake that he sent back her way may have said that it wasn’t worth it at the time, but she still saved the urge for later.

Clark lowered his gaze to the floor once he was in the hallway, and didn’t bother looking up to see where they were taking him. He already knew, after all.

When the guards stopped in front of a large door, Clark opened his mouth. “Hey, Mercy.”

The woman who stood in front of it dipped her head to him in greeting before waving her hand silently at one of the guards. Clark didn't need to turn around to know that he was now frowning. 

“But Ms. Graves, what if something happens? We need to be in there at all times to monitor the metahuman.”

Mercy fixed him with an icy glare that clearly conveyed the fact that she was in a much higher position than he was, and was much more armed. One that stated that the very notion of her being unable to protect her boss from one lowly metahuman boy (especially one that was weakened by an inhibitor collar) was ludicrous in every way shape and form. It also said that she would gladly dance on his grave if he so much as lifted a finger to stop her. 

The guards understandably stepped down.

As soon as Mercy opened the door to let him in, Clark stood inside of the room. It was best to get it over with as quickly as possible.

“Mr. Kent, it's wonderful to see you again. Please, have a seat.” Lex Luthor smiled at him like a snake-deadly and reptilian.

Clark remained standing. “What do you want from me, Luthor?”

The older man steepled his fingers in front of him while resting his elbows on the nice wooden desk. “I'm simply giving you a chance to redeem yourself. Think of how much of an example you can set to the public if you just say that you're loyal to me and only me.”

Clark crossed his arms and narrowed his blue eyes, desperately wishing that he was still able to use his laser vision. “I'm not like one of your pets, Luthor. I won't roll over like a good lapdog just because you tell me to.”

“I think you will, Mr. Kent. You see, I have six very powerful bargaining chips hanging over your head, eight if we count your parents and nine if we include #1333. I heard that your friend even gave it a name-how cute.”

Clark curled his hands into fists. “Don’t hurt my family, Luthor.”

“I figured that you might say something like that, so I won’t. I’ll just let you do it for me.”

“What?” Clark growled, setting his shoulders. He didn’t like the sound of that, and it also raised a host of unsettling questions beside the obvious “how will he make me?” one. Maybe the inhibitor collar could also control him? It was unlikely, but still. If Luthor  _ did _ manage to somehow get him under his control, would he still be conscious and aware of what was going on, as if he were trapped in his own body? Was Luthor actually just bluffing to get him to do whatever it was that he wanted Clark to do?

“It’s simple, really. All I have to do is let you and your friends rip each other to pieces.” Luthor stood up, pulling something small out of his pocket.

“Why would we ever do that?” Clark asked angrily while eyeing Luthor’s hand warily. He didn’t know if the older man had grabbed a weapon, and if he had, he didn’t know what it could do to him. Not much may have affected him, but if there was anything in the world that could hurt him or make him sick, than he knew that Luthor would be the man who had it, no matter how rare it was.

“Because you’re all hiding things from each other,” Luthor said simply, leaning across the desk. “Do you remember what I told you when I brought you to my office for the first time after you arrived here, Mr. Kent?”

“Not to talk to get attached to anybody and not to tell them anything about myself,” Clark muttered. “But just because  _ you _ tell me to do something doesn’t mean that I’m going to do it.”

“Well, you seem to have already broken both of those simple guidelines, so let’s see if you can’t follow this one.” Luthor leaned even more far forward until he was practically nose-to-nose with Clark. “If you even think about telling those metahumans that you’re sharing a cell with about the fact that you know me personally, I will give my men the order to set one free. Only one, and with an inhibitor collar.”

Clark jerked back in confusion. That sounded like an okay deal to him, and certainly not something that qualified as a threat on any level. “Huh?”

“Maybe it will be #1333. It would be interesting to release it with a collar and let my Hunters, well,  _ hunt _ it. Or I’ll send #1558 without a collar, and just break one of its legs instead-it’d be easier and less expensive to make one for its superspeed anyways, although we would have to come up with a way to avoid its unnaturally fast  healing. Perhaps even #1192 because of the wings. It would be an easier target to hit, but they could administer nonlethal wounds and bring it down before killing it slowly.” Clark recoiled in horror as he realized what Luthor meant.

“Y-you’d send Hunters after them?” He gasped. “You would let them take down my friends as-as target practice?”

“Of course,” Luthor said. “They deserve a chance to be free, don’t they? And I’m able to give it to them, as long as they’re wearing collars and letting my Hunters chase them.”

Clark shook his head. “I-I won’t tell anybody, I promise,” he lied. “I’ll keep this a secret.”

“Good. Now, I believe that it’s time for you to return to your ‘friends.’ Mercy?” The door opened in response to the command, and the female bodyguard reached out and grabbed Clark’s shoulder, pulling him out back into the hallway. The squad of guards was still standing there waiting, all of them in the exact same position with the exact same stony facial expression. Clark lowed his gaze back down to the floor, ignoring the way that they were looking at him as if they were surprised that he was still in one piece.

That is, until his attention was caught by something shiny (actually  _ two _ somethings) sticking out of the top of the pocket of the man who was starting to walk in front of him. Clark’s heart skipped a beat.

They could have belonged to any of the collars. They could have even not belonged to any one of them, and just been something that the man had picked up off of the ground and subsequently forgotten to turn in.

But… It could have been the right ones. The odds weren’t high by any stretch of the word, but it could have been.

Clark didn’t even know that when he was walked past a cell, a teenage girl was leaning up against the door, waiting to be lead to the training room for yet another time as she absently rubbed at the coiling tattoo of a green snake that curled up from her waist to her collarbone. He didn’t know that her powers were based off of probability, and that she had just accidentally changed the destiny of the entire earth.

The guard who was marching behind Clark paused as the metahuman boy stopped walking. He gave the teenager a strong shove. “What are you dawdling for? Get moving, scum!”

“Sorry,” the boy muttered in reply. “Just tripped over something.”

“Well, watch where you’re going next time!” The man hissed.

Clark nodded and kept walking, not once tripping again until he was back in his cell with his friends, all of whom were asking him questions at once. Well, all of them except for Bruce, who was looking at Clark’s clenched fist instead of talking.

“What did you get?” Bruce asked quietly, although everybody still heard him despite the fact that they were still all speaking.

Glancing quickly up at the small camera in the corner of the ceiling, Clark quickly flashed his hand open at the other teenagers. It wasn’t for very long, but it was still easy enough for them to see that he was holding a pair of keys to a pair of inhibitor collars.

Ones that were marked with the same numbers that the scientists had labelled him and J’onn.


	9. Don't Look Clear Because It's All Uphill From Here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Similar to the chapter before last, where it’s like a small series of one-shots.

Hiding the keys to the inhibitor collars was harder than they expected. First they had to make sure that the ones that they had were the ones that actually  _ unlocked  _ J’onn and Clark’s specific collars (they were), without the people who were constantly watching them from the cameras-something that still weirded most them out based off of the pure creepiness factor even without the rest of it considered-seeing them. That was difficult enough, although they still managed to do it, but it was equally hard to actually keep them hidden when they were being roughly dragged to the training room.

But they managed. The seven metahumans traded off duties, hiding the keys in Bruce’s seemingly bottomless pockets, light construct bubbles that John then hid down his shirt, tucked carefully in between the individual feathers of Shayera’s wings, rolled into the outside of the waistband of Wally’s pants, clenched once again inside of Clark’s fists, slipped into J’onn’s way-too-small shoes, or mysteriously hidden by Diana, who would just stare at you and not say anything while smiling secretively if you asked her where she put it. Everybody assumed that Bruce knew. He did, but wasn’t telling.

They would manage. They had to. Those keys were, well, the keys to their survival.

Clark still didn’t tell them that he knew Luthor.

* * *

Clark claimed Billy the next time that they saw him. He didn’t even say anything, just stopped and stared for a moment before being lightly elbowed in the small of his back by Diana, who was behind him, so that he would continue walking and not get punished. The metahuman boy made direct eye contact with Bruce. “He’s mine now. I’ll protect him.”

“Fine.” Bruce didn’t doubt it.

* * *

 

Wally didn’t even have time to react before there was a needle jabbed into his neck. All that he had been doing was walking back to his cell-well,  _ being  _ walked, but that was basically the same thing now. And then there was a sharp pinch on the side of his neck before his legs suddenly refused to cooperate with his brain. His limbs turned to jelly and his legs went out from beneath him, the world suddenly moving in and out.

Someone grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet, but his body was just too heavy. Wally flopped limply down on their shoulder.

“Wass goin’ on?” he slurred, wondering if he should be alarmed. Whoever was holding him up paused for a moment before answering, carefully pulling him along.

“I don’t know what they used, but they drugged you with something. Come on, can you move your legs?” Bruce asked. Wally giggled, and the other boy sighed. Apparently not.

Clark ducked underneath Wally’s other arm. “Why did they choose him? I mean, it seems like it’s always him.”

“Who knows,” Bruce muttered with a shrug. “Where are the other ones?”

“Already in the cell, I think,” Clark replied. Then he winced as the glare of two of the guards turned to him. He wouldn’t be able to pull Wally out of the way in time if they thought that he deserved punishment. “Or at least one their way there. Should we get him going?”

Wally giggled again. “Clark,” he sang. “Claarrkkk. Where are the keys, Clark? I need the keys. I promised. Clark. Clark. Are you listening to-mph!”

Bruce clapped his hand over the ginger speedster’s mouth, muffling his words. Undeterred, Wally kept babbling, occasionally stopping to blink away the darkness that was slowly creeping in at the edges of his vision. Clark sent his not-drugged friend a worried look as Wally continued to slur nonsensically into Bruce’s hand. “Do you think that they heard?” He asked in a small nervous whisper, ducking his head when one of said guards glared at him. “The guards, I mean.”

The other boy glanced around, eyes alighting on the confused face of the guard who was walking in the lead. “No, I don’t think so. And even of they did, they don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Clark nodded, not exactly reassured. His free hand, the one not supporting his drugged ginger friend, rested in the only pocket in his pants that didn’t have a hole in it. It currently held the keys to the inhibitor collars, since it was his turn to hide them from the guards. It had been Shayera’s before him, but after an incident where they became dislodged from her feathers and almost fell from her wings while she was doing the obstacle course, it was unanimously decided that she should take a break from hiding them, at least until she could find a better place to store them.

As soon as they were shoved back into their cell (where the other four were waiting for them), Bruce propped the redheaded metahuman up against the not-cement wall of the room. Diana sprang to her feet, cerulean eyes widening as she took in her friend’s condition. “What’s wrong with him?”

Wally let out a high-pitched giggle. “Diana, what are you doing? You’re not supposed to be standing… Sit down… You’re not supposed to stand up!”

Diana blinked at him in confusion before looking at Clark. “What is he talking about?”

“No idea,” he answered with a sigh, palming the keys to the collars so that he could pass them off to the next person who would watch them-J’onn. “They drugged him with something, but we don’t know what it was.”

Wally laughed again, this time trying to stand before his legs went out from beneath him. As his limbs trembled like gelatin, the speedster’s green eyes slowly started to grow to roughly the size of dinner plates. “Guys…” He said, making actual sense for the first time since they had drugged him, “Guys, I think I’m drugged.”

“I know,” Shayera snickered. “We noticed.”

Once Clark had slipped the keys to J’onn for safekeeping, the six not-drugged metahuman teenagers sat in a hastily constructed circle on the floor to discuss what they were going to do with their friend. After his brief moment of clarity, Wally had returned to saying nonsensical things and falling over every time he tried to stand up, which happened often enough for John to form a set of light construct bindings to keep him still and in one place so that he couldn’t himself or one of them on accident.

“How long will it be until it wears off?” Shayera asked. “Do any of you know?”   


They all shook their heads. Bruce frowned. “He almost told everyone about the fact that we have the Reds.” It was his own private word for the keys, when he wanted to make sure that everyone in the cell knew what he was talking about. “But we managed to cover his mouth."

Diana hissed. “Did they suspect anything?”

“I doubt it,” Bruce sighed, crossing his legs. “Although we can’t be sure.”

“Not without asking them,” Clark sighed, “and that’s not even an option.”

“No.” John looked over at his friend, whose fingers were twitching erratically, seemingly without his knowledge or consent. “Maybe it’ll wear off faster because of his metabolism? Unless they tailored it specifically so that he would be the only one properly affected? Because then it would stay in his system for longer, which would make a little more sense than making a general drug that he could shrug off, I guess.” He frowned. “I think.”

Shayera and J’onn nodded.

“Yeah,” Shayera said. “How long are we going to keep him tied up over there?”

J’onn folded his arms up, hugging his shoulders. “They have used several drugs on me in the past, but I do not recognize the effects of that one.”

“Have you ever seen anybody who was affected by one like it?” Bruce asked him. “Other metahumans that were being experimented on?”

J’onn shook his head quickly. “There was only one other metahuman who was drug tested the same way that I was, and he…” The green-skinned boy took a deep, if shaky, breath before he continued. “He died trying to protect me.”

Diana closed her eyes. “So many are dead because of them.” When she opened them, they were suspiciously shiny, but none of them commented on it. “What was their name? Their powers?”

“Robert, I think,” J’onn said, frowning. “He said to call him Bobby or Burnout, however. I believe that the second one was because of his pyrokinetic abilities.”

“He had a nickname based off of his powers?” Shayera said, tilting her head and narrowing her eyes. “That’s… Actually not a bad idea. When we get out of here, come up with a nickname for me. I want it to be badass, but still easy enough to say, so nothing really long.”

Bruce huffed and looked over at Wally, who was looking around and still trying to speak through the makeshift gag that had been placed over his mouth. “What do you think he’s talking about?”

“Not a clue,” Clark said with a shrug.

The ginger teenage boy twisted in the green light construct binding, trying to escape. His pupils were dilating and contracting inside of his green irises. His hair was slicked to his freckled forehead with sweat, and his limbs were trembling. He was just barely clinging to the real world, through a blurry and psychedelic overlay that spun and contorted with different colors, some of which Wally didn’t think that he had ever seen before. The drugs, whatever they were, weren’t  _ painful,  _ per say, just very, very,  _ very  _ unpleasant to have in his system. Wally’s powers weren’t responding properly, either. They were there, but when he tried to access them his body started to vibrate uncontrollably.

John winced as the accidental friction that the speedster was creating started to weaken his light constructs. They weren’t easy to break for just anybody, but John was also pretty sure that his subconscious was trying to tell him that he should let his friend go, that this was  _ wrong.  _ But it wasn’t like he could just allow his incoherent friend to go free. Wally could hurt them, or himself, without even trying.

“I can’t hold him for too much longer,” John warned his friends. “I mean, I could, but if he keeps creating friction the constructs will just get weaker and weaker, and he might burn himself trying to get out. Unless he’s friction-proof.”

“Only his hands and feet, and maybe his legs, I’m not sure,” Bruce replied to his friend. “They have to be if he’s able to run as fast as he does without any pain.”

“I can help,” J’onn offered. “My telekinetic abilities do not create an friction when I use them.”

John nodded. “Can you get his legs, then? They’re what’s moving the fastest, I think.”

“Release them… Now,” J’onn said, rising up to his feet and lifting his hands. The green construct bounds around Wally’s legs and wrists disappeared, and immediately the speedster metahuman tried to run forward. But then J’onn curled his hands into loose fists, flicking his wrists. Almost instantly, the redheaded boy tripped over empty air, which then dragged him back over to the wall. Wally squeaked in protest, trying to flail his arms before he was stopped by the green metahuman teen narrowing his bright red eyes, which took on an eerie glow as he used his powers to pin his wrists back to the cell wall. John’s constructs were still secured around his waist and upper chest, looped strongly around the younger teenager’s skinny body. “Great, thanks. I can’t feel the vibrations anymore. Well, I can, but still. Thanks.”

J’onn’s cheeks turned darker green, and Shayera huffed in amusement as she realized that it must have been his equivalent to blushing. “You are welcome.”

The drugs didn’t wear off for another hour, which was mostly spent trying to keep Wally’s mouth covered and then, when that proved to be harder than expected, keeping him from letting it slip that they had the keys to the two inhibitor collars. When they finally  _ did  _ wear off, or at least enough for the young teenager to be in control of his actions, J’onn let go with his telekinesis, seeing as how John was confident that he could now hold Wally with only his light constructs.

When he had returned to full coherency, the others knew that Wally was feeling better when he started to complain about how it was always him that was the target, and then proceeded to flirt with Clark and Diana.

* * *

 

Shayera woke up screaming.

Her heart was pounding in her throat and there was a layer of cold sweat covering her body. Her wings shot out on instinct, slamming into the walls and sending pain jerking up into her shoulders and ribs. Panicking, she tried to stand, only to trip over what felt like flesh. She stumbled backwards, back hitting the wall. Clapping her hands over her ears, Shayera squeezed her golden eyes tightly shut and tried to block out the sight that she just  _ knew  _ that she would see if she opened them.

“Please,” she muttered to herself, burying her face in her arms, “please don’t let them be dead.”

Something gently touched her arm and she twisted away with a small scream as fear threatened to choke her. Another thing-a  _ hand,  _ but how was there a hand if they were all  _ dead? _ -rested on her shoulder, carefully rubbing it. The winged metahuman girl blindly struck out at whoever was touching her, eyes still closed. “It’s a dream it’s a dream it’s all a dream,” she repeated to herself. “They’re dead they’re dead they’re all dead!”

“No, we’re not,” someone, someone who sounded like John, said quietly. “Just open your eyes. We’re all alive, and we’re all here, Shayera. Just open your eyes, come on.”

Shayera refused, one of her wings coming up to cover her face. Calloused hands carefully pulled it away, and someone touched her face. Whoever was rubbing her shoulder had started to move lower and lower down her arm, and they were almost at her elbow by now. Their fingers were longer than the ones who had pulled away her wing, and felt much smaller on her skin.

Slowly, the teenager blinked open her eyes. Instead of being faced with corpses endowed with the ability to walk and speak and  _ grasp,  _ her golden eyes met a pair of concerned green ones.

“Are you alright?” John asked. “Was it a nightmare, or…?”

Shayera nodded, looking past him to see that the rest of her friends were standing too-Wally was the one rubbing her arm, while Diana was practically on top of him, soft blue eyes practically radiating light with concern. Clark and J’onn were hovering in the air, eyes on her. J’onn’s expression was pained, and Shayera remembered that he had been able to tell at least vaguely what Wally had been dreaming about her first night in the cell with them. Had he been able to feel her base emotions throughout the nightmare, the overwhelming horror and fear that had threatened to swallow her? The teenage girl hoped not.

At the back of the room (actually the front, since she couldn’t see that he was in front of the door), Shayera could just barely make out Bruce’s form. Even if she couldn’t see him all that well, however, she could still hear him when he spoke. “What was it about?”

Shayera’s heartbeat quickened, her dream’s claws still buried in her brain.

_ The smell of blood was everywhere, accompanied by the choking cloy of sickness and deadly disease. Bones snapped beneath Shayera’s feet as she tried to rise, her feathers slicked with crimson liquid. Something let out a hollow moan, and she jumped back as a bruised hand wrapped around her ankle. Dead eyes stared blankly up at her as she tried to twist away. Her yellow eyes widened as she recognized the face, and she screamed as more and more bodies began to rise up from the ground, fingers hooking for her flesh and broken bloody teeth snapping hungrily at her skin. _

“I don’t remember,” she lied.

Diana twitched, and Shayera remembered what she had said when she listed her powers-that she knew when someone was lying, no matter how good they were at it. Hopefully the other girl wouldn’t pressure her. Shayera had been having nightmares like this for years, whether it was about the scientists and their experiments or about what happened when she was caught.

Something lightly touched her feathers on one of her wings, and she startled slightly. It wasn’t unpleasant, seeing as how she actually quite liked having her wings touched by her friends and family (or at least she used to) but it was surprising. The last time that any of them had touched her wings like this had been when she had inhaled the fear toxins or whatever it was that the scientists had released into their cell. Shayera only had vague memories of it, but she was relatively sure that someone had been trying to calm her down and bring her back to reality by touching them.

“Do you want me to stop?” John asked, pausing in his stroking. Shayera leaned back into his hands and shook her head, blushing lightly as she closed her eyes. She needed something nice right now. “Okay then, I’ll keep going.”

All around her, Shayera’s friends started to settle down. Wally curled up in a small ball near her knees after she sank back down into a sitting position, pulling one of her wings over his body like it was a feathery blanket. Bruce and Diana lay down beside each other, Diana whispering something to her friend that Shayera couldn’t be bothered to listen to. J’onn alighted back down on the ground and slipped over to the corner, where he could make sure that he could see everyone and not get snuck up on. Clark leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes as he stretched his legs out in front of him. John squeezed up on Shayera’s other side, still with both of his hands on her wing.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She could feel Wally’s heartbeat, too fast for a normal human, trembling as it came up through her feathers. She could hear breathing from six different lungs, seven if she counted her own, the quiet sounds of Bruce and Diana talking.

Shayera was safe. It didn’t matter that she wouldn’t be tomorrow or the day after, when she was dragged away for experimentation, what mattered was that she was okay then.

The next time that she fell asleep, Shayera dreamed of flying.

* * *

The word spread quickly, through whispered words over shared food that had been saved and stolen so that friends and maybe even family could eat, through cellmates that heard from the people that they were tested beside, from young adults that paused in the middle of comforting injured children to the best of their ability as they tried to protect their ‘charges’ from the guards.

The message was almost always the same, with some small variations. Hushed voices could only convey so much, after all, and there was always the threat of punishment for speaking hanging over their heads.

But when someone finally managed to get the message to the boy formerly known as #1333, now called Billy, he knew exactly who had been the first one to send it.

“Be ready tomorrow,” the voices whispered to each other. “Be ready tomorrow.”


End file.
